A assimetria entre verbos de concordância e verbos simples em Língua Brasileira de Sinais

Abstract

This paper aims at discussing the asymmetry between plain verbs (with no morphological agreement) and agreement verbs in Brazilian Sign Language (Libras). The presence or absence of morphological agreement interacts with different possibilities, and restrictions, to order the signs in the clause. Plain verb constructions have a more restricted word order; on the other hand, agreement verbs allow different orders like SOV and OVS more freely. Additionally, there are also differences on constructions with object topicalization; and on the position of the negative particle no in the sentence. Therefore, in this paper I present and discuss these asymmetries, providing a syntactic explanation for these constructions, based on a Generative framework and on the syntactic derivation of agreement in Libras proposed by Lourenço (2014).