Abstract:

 

This dissertation examines the constructions used in American Sign Language (ASL) to describe affective events: those in which an experiencer undergoes an internal change upon perceiving a stimulus, such as a child experiencing fascination upon seeing a bear at the zoo. Previous studies on these kinds of constructions have centered on psych verbs, proposing accounts for how the semantics of verbs like admire versus amuse map onto syntactic structures with subject-experiencers or object-experiencers, respectively. Here I take a different approach to analyzing affective constructions, following the Cognitive Grammar framework and examining the distinct construals evoked by different grammatical constructions that can be used to describe the same affective event.

 

The data for this study were collected from Deaf native ASL signers in response to a short film in which characters react with various affects to animate and inanimate stimuli. The analysis investigated constructions that consultants used to describe affective events. These data indicate that ASL affective constructions are formed of two intransitive clauses: the first clause establishes the stimulus in the discourse, and the subsequent clause denotes the experiencer's affective change through an affective lexical predicate, constructed action, or constructed dialogue. The intransitive affective clauses used in ASL evoke construals in which the internal change initiates with the experiencer rather than the stimulus. This is unlike the transitive constructions described in previous studies, which evoke a construal of causation as though the stimulus acts upon the experiencer. The distinct construals evoked by each construction type are examined, as well as the cognitive processes employed for creating and understanding each construction type.

 

Langacker (2008) stresses that the natural environment for language is discourse, language in use. This dissertation investigated ASL in naturalistic usage events. Examining language in its natural state enabled the analysis to see the biclausal nature of the complex affective constructional schema to be identified. The analysis also made clear the prevalence of constructed action and constructed dialogue in these data, highlighting the benefits of investigation into affective constructions, defined more broadly than psych verbs, which can be applied to research on spoken languages as well.