Abstract
This paper presents an analysis in Matsuoka (1997) of three seemingly unrelated constructions in American Sign Language (ASL): verb final, verb sandwich, and object shift. It is argued here that the three constructions are all derived via verb raising targeting the Asp head, which is assumed to be head-final in ASL. It is also shown that the Copy Theory of Movement (Chomsky 1995) relates the verb final and the verb sandwich constructions. The syntactic analyses in the previous work are presented in a recent framework in the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995). Written for the audience who might not be familiar with Minimalist Syntax, the paper includes an introduction of the derivation of sentences in spoken English and French. Braze's (2003) amendment of Matsuoka's model is also presented. In the discussion of the object shift construction, the paper shows that spoken and sign languages both exhibit the abstract syntactic property regarding the availability of verb raising and object shift. Particularly, it is noteworthy that Holmberg's Generalization can be observed in the object shift construction in both spoken Icelandic and ASL. The analysis presented in this paper strongly indicates the possibility that verb raising and its relationship to the availability of object shift are a part of the universal aspects of Human Language.
