ArticleCognition2020
The communicative importance of agent-backgrounding: Evidence from homesign and Nicaraguan Sign Language.
Article in Cognition, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- What can language creation tell us about language evolution?The American psychologist · 2025Article
- Argument marking in a new sign language.Te Reo : proceedings of the Linguistic Society of New Zealand · 2025Article
- The organization of verb meaning in Lengua de Señas Nicaragüense (LSN): Sequential or simultaneous structures?Glossa (London) · 2024Article
- Typological Comparisons and Considerations: Phonological and Morphological Evidence from Sign Language Creation.Sign language studies · 2024Article
- Structural biases that children bring to language learning: A cross-cultural look at gestural input to homesign.Cognition · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
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Abstract
Some concepts are more essential for human communication than others. In this paper, we investigate whether the concept of agent-backgrounding is sufficiently important for communication that linguistic structures for encoding this concept are present in young sign languages. Agent-backgrounding constructions serve to reduce the prominence of the agent - the English passive sentence a book was knocked over is an example. Although these constructions are widely attested cross-linguistically, there is little prior research on the emergence of such devices in new languages. Here we studied how agent-backgrounding constructions emerge in Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) and adult homesign systems. We found that NSL signers have innovated both lexical and morphological devices for expressing agent-backgrounding, indicating that conveying a flexible perspective on events has deep communicative value. At the same time, agent-backgrounding devices did not emerge at the same time as agentive devices. This result suggests that agent-backgrounding does not have the same core cognitive status as agency. The emergence of agent-backgrounding morphology appears to depend on receiving a linguistic system as input in which linguistic devices for expressing agency are already well-established.
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