Introduction

Verb agreement is a topic that has received much attention in the sign language literature. Figure 9.1 shows what is often called “verb agreement” in the literature. This phenomenon has been noted in many signed languages.

The two signs, taken from American Sign Language (ASL), both describe a person asking another person. The difference lies in which of the two persons is asking the other. In the absence of prior context, the first sign means I asked someone while the second sign means someone asked me. They differ only in the orientation and direction of movement; in the first example, the hand is oriented and moves away from the signer's body, and in the other, it is oriented and moves in the opposite direction, toward the body. Such changes in the orientation and direction of movement are linked to the change in meaning described above. The phenomenon has several properties in almost all of the sign languages documented to date that make it look different from verb agreement in spoken languages.

For a working definition of agreement, the chapter follows Corbett's (2006) criteria for canonical agreement. He starts with a broad definition from Steele (1978: 610): “the term agreement commonly refers to some systematic covariance between a semantic or formal property of one element and a formal property of another.” Then, he distinguishes four necessary aspects of agreement – controller, target, domain and feature – and defines each as follows: