| Abstract: |
This paper examines tenses in American
Sign Language (ASL), which
will be useful for the ASL Translation project. In the past,
researchers
believed that ASL used only Time Adverbials to indicate time.
However, new
evidence indicates that ASL marks tense grammatically as well. In
order to
properly analyze ASL tense structure, Aarons, Bahan, Kegal and
Neidle
identified the Lexical Tense Marker and proposed a notion called
"Tense
Phrase", which is a very important concept of the ASL syntax.
This paper
will discuss this Tense Phrase in great detail along with Time
Indicator,
Time Adverbial and Lexical Tense Marker. |