Liddell's proposal that there are gestures in agreement verbs

Forty years of research on signed languages has revealed the unquestionable fact that signers construct their utterances in a structured way from units that are defined within a language system. They do not pantomime or “draw pictures in the air.” But does this mean that every aspect of a signed articulation should have the same status as a linguistic unit?

A proposal by Liddell (1995; 1996; Liddell and Metzger 1998) has brought the issue of the linguistic status of certain parts of American Sign Language (ASL) utterances to the fore. He proposes that agreement verbs are not verbs simultaneously articulated with agreement morphemes, but verbs simultaneously articulated with pointing gestures. Agreement verbs are verbs that move to locations in signing space associated with particular referents in the discourse. A signer may establish a man on the left side at location x and a woman on the right side at location y. Then, to sign ‘He asks her,’ the signer moves the lexical sign ASK from location x to location y. The locations in these constructions have been analyzed as agreement morphemes (Fischer and Gough 1978; Klima and Bellugi 1979; Padden 1988; Liddell and Johnson 1989; Lillo-Martin and Klima 1990; Aarons et al. 1992) that combine with the lexical verb to form a multimorphemic sign x ASKy.