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Peer-Review Record

Early Emergence of Agreement in Yucatec Maya Sign Language

Languages 2022, 7(3), 233; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages7030233

by Olivier Le Guen

Reviewer 1: Anonymous

Reviewer 2: Anonymous

Languages 2022, 7(3), 233; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages7030233

Submission received: 12 May 2022 / Revised: 30 July 2022 / Accepted: 31 August 2022 / Published: 7 September 2022

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Emergence of Sign Languages)

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (New Reviewer)

This paper examines the ‘grammatical use of space’ in varieties of YMSL. The data are from an elicitation task, where community members were shown video clips and asked to describe what they saw for an addressee. The data are described. There is discussion of the differences in the data, which are argued to reflect differences between speech communities. There is a discussion at the end of the paper about the relationship between (1) the finding that abstract use of space for grammatical purposes as in “double agreement” is not widespread in the data and (2) a dominant use of absolute frames of reference in the larger community (i.e., non-signing community members).

The paper is interesting and potentially valuable but I would not say that it is ready for publication. If the editors want to publish it, I would encourage them to ask the author to make some revisions. Here are a few issues.

Major issues:

The paper is too long and convoluted. It has a rambling style. I found it difficult to know what it was really about until I finished reading it. It needs to be significantly shorter – currently 44 pages of main text – could easily be reduced to 25 pages, or even less. This will help to focus the paper’s goal. At the end of the paper, in section 7 and around there, hypotheses are introduced for testing – these ideas should be presented at the beginning, and should serve as the framing for the paper, it would be easier to read that way.

There is little motivation or explanation for why the particular stimulus set is chosen to be used in this study. In the end, it becomes clear, but some commentary at the outset to explain why that particular stimulus set is good for studying the research questions at hand would be very valuable.

The sample of participants in the study is quite small, and I can understand why this is, given the sociolinguistic situation. The issue that should be addressed is that there is little possibility for statistical analysis, or any definitive statements about what occurs (or does not occur) in YMSL more generally. While there is explicit reference to “statistical analysis”, no statistics are performed or presented, other than basic presentation of the numbers in the data. The sample is small, not only in terms of the small number of participants, but also in terms of the very limited stimulus materials; this means that it’s hard to make strong claims about what strategies are, or can, be used in these language varieties. In general, I think that the statements are rather strongly worded for the tenuous nature of the data being presented (e.g., p43 “Our results confirm…”).

Minor issues:

There are many typographical errors and errors of wording, which need to be fixed. A careful round of copy-editing is needed.

The claims about “Western cultures” not having absolute frames of reference are too strong – languages like English do have absolute frames of reference, and use them; revise for accuracy

Table 7 – “Preferred FoR” – what evidence is used for this claim? This is a complex issue of context-sensitivity and I do not believe that whole languages can be categorized by their “preferred FoR”

The diagrams such as Figure 9 appeared to be overhead views, but then the smiley face would be on top of the participants’ head – this is confusing

P21 – are “plain verbs” the same thing as “no marking”? If so, the claim on p31 that “Signers who did not mark pronouns as R-loci are more likely to rely on a plain verb construction” is a tautology

The captions to the figures are not very informative – it would be good to have more detail as to what the reader should be looking at in the diagrams.

Author Response

Major issues:

I significantly reduced the manuscript taking out some side issues. I think 25 pages would not do as I have to explain many concepts and the communities. However, I manage to cut more than 10 pages.

I put the hypothesis earlier on so the main issues are clearer from the beginning. A paragraph has been added for this in the introduction.

I added a paragraph in the method section to explain why such stimulus is relevant and that it has been used in previous studies in other SLs.

I am not sure to understand. All results are presented in percentage.

The sample is small, not only in terms of the small number of participants, but also in terms of the very limited stimulus materials; this means that it’s hard to make strong claims about what strategies are, or can, be used in these language varieties. In general, I think that the statements are rather strongly worded for the tenuous nature of the data being presented (e.g., p43 “Our results confirm…”).

I added a section on the limitations of the study tackling specifically this issue. I also modified some formulations to make them less definitive.

Minor issues:

There are many typographical errors and errors of wording, which need to be fixed. A careful round of copy-editing is needed.

The claims about “Western cultures” not having absolute frames of reference are too strong – languages like English do have absolute frames of reference, and use them; revise for accuracy

At any point in the paper do I say this! I think you must have inferred that. Many Indo-European languages do have absolute FoR but they use them in very limited settings. In any case, this is not the preferred For, especially for small spaces. I don’t like the term “Western” as it does not mean a lot as some rural populations behave very differently from people in urban settings in the West. However, I am also always very careful in how I talk of the use of space and specifically FoRs in my writings.

I modify the formulation.

However, to be clear, I am not talking about the linguistic preferred FoR but the use in everyday tasks and at the cognitive level, i.e., based on experiment such as the animals in a row task, etc.

The preference for a FoR is general in a culture. If you are a speaker of English or Spanish and I say you have something on your chick, the one to the East, you might find this confusing while this will not be the case for aboriginal people (See the work by Alice Gaby or John Haviland for instance). The linguistic preference is another issue and is not straightforward, as the use of linguistic terms does not always reflect the way people think about space and the actual FoR they use in dealing with actual arrangements of objects on space. For instance, French speakers I interviewed would use North-South-East-West in a task but consider North as the top of the page (as if it was a map) but really it was not to the actual North at all. So, linguistically one would hear only absolute language when in fact there was only the use of an egocentric FoR in the arrangement. Th case of Yucatec Maya speaker is almost the contrary as they do not use many linguistic or verbal FoR and instead provide the information with gesture.

The diagrams such as Figure 9 appeared to be overhead views, but then the smiley face would be on top of the participants’ head – this is confusing

I modified the diagram and placed a much more iconic view from the top, hopefully this is now less confusing.

I know it is confusing. I modified it as R2 also made the same comment. I relied on the classification proposed by Padden et al. (2009) for ABSL. Authors oppose spatial verbs and the rest of the verb as “plain verbs”. But, as you point out, this is not really satisfying. I will use the category “uninflected verbs”.

The captions to the figures are not very informative – it would be good to have more detail as to what the reader should be looking at in the diagrams.

I try to explain in more details what reader should be looking at in the diagrams. I hope this is now satisfying.

Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)

This paper presents interesting results on the emergence of verb agreement in Yucatec Maya Sign Language. This is an important issue, inasmuch as it has been argued that many emergent sign languages lack verb agreement (unlike national sign languages such as ASL, LSM, or ISL). In general I find the results presented In this paper to be quite interesting. The reported data show both individual differences and community differences.

The authors make some interesting comments about culturally-determined frames of reference, but this discussion needs further development in my view. For example, on p. 3, lines 99-100, the authors write that the abstract use of space is common in co-speech gesture in most Western educated societies and cite two papers by McNeill. It would be helpful to add a sentence or two explaining the claims made in McNeill’s papers. The authors say that, given this use of gestural space in these societies, it is natural that the abstract use of space emerged in the sign languages of these societies. But is such use of space in signed languages restricted to the signed languages of these Western countries? What about the national signed languages in non-Western countries?

As noted below I have a variety of concerns about how the authors describe the linguistic phenomena they are investigating. A particularly crucial concern is this: The writing in this paper is an obstacle to the understanding of the authors’ ideas. The paper needs major revisions before it can be published—in particular, the paper needs a major re-write with the help of a native or near-native speaker of English. Other more specific comments follow below:

Issues of linguistic description

p. 2, line 46-7: The text indicates that plain verbs in a language such as ASL “have a semantics oriented to the subject being the patient of the action.” I believe it would be more appropriate to use the term “experiencer”.

p. 9, line 234: Please clarify the comment about the coding of “anaphoric reference”. What’s the relevance, for example, of handshape? Were the authors coding the handshape of the pointing sign that was used to refer to an R-locus?

p. 9, line 239: The use of the term “pronoun marking” is unclear. Is this the indication of loci in space or is this what agreeing verbs do? It is in fact the properties of the agreement verb (witness GIVE vs. TAKE) that signify whether the referent of a given locus is the subject or object of that verb.

p. 9, line 262: Participants do not create anaphorical referents; the referent is in the real or imagined world. The participants instead established loci by which they could refer back to Personae 1-3.

p. 13, heading to 4.2.2. I might instead say “The use of space for pronominal reference”.

p. 15: There is a potential confusion here in the use of the term “plain verb”. The authors use it both to refer to the class of verbs identified by Padden (1983) (p. 2) and to verbs that are not marked for agreement. Note that Padden’s 1983 plain verbs typically lack the center-in or center-out movement described on p. 15 inasmuch as those verbs are generally body-anchored. With regard to the data from YMSL, the authors could discuss “uninflected” or “nonagreeing verbs”.

p. 16, Figure 10: The subscripted notations used in these examples seem on their face to be more or less standard, but their use here is confusing. The examples in Fig. 10 are all supposed to show plain verbs, but the notation would suggest that these verbs are agreeing. In (b), the gloss for the buoy includes the subscript P1, apparently indicating that the signer is referring to Persona 1 in the stimulus; see Fig. 2. According to the authors, this signer—see Fig. 6—apparently shows agreement with the “ordinal loci” (p. 12, line 314) on such buoys. So, why is the verb TAKE in (c) coded as a plain verb? The signer’s gaze and the starting point of TAKE both seem consistent with agreement.

A related problem appears in (f) and (g): if these verbs are plain verbs, why do the authors use a notation that would suggest that they are agreeing verbs?

The authors need to discuss their use of these subscripts in their methods sections on data coding (sections 3.3 & 4.1).

p. 16, line 420: Here the authors need to distinguish between regular and backwards agreeing verbs.

p. 16, line 414: The notion that, early in the emergence of verb agreement, movement might be restricted to the sagittal axis has been explored by other authors, notably I. Meir & colleagues. The authors of the current paper should discuss this.

p. 18, Fig. 12 caption: Why is this utterance glossed with the passive “is passed”?

Results

p. 22, lines 547-550: I believe that the authors have introduced some confusion in their discussion of the terminology (rotated and unrotated representations) used in Senghas (2003). See her Figure 1 on p. 518; the authors cite this image in line 550. This figure shows the woman giving a cup to the man on her right—who, from the viewer’s perspective, is on the left side of the video image. As described by the authors, the woman is giving a cup to a man on her left.

p. 23: Please be more precise: On p. 23, line, the authors write “Another issue, somehow related to the use of FoRs….” The word “somehow” needs to be replaced.

p. 23: Table 5. I don’t understand what scores are being correlated here. I’m also concerned that this statistical analysis may not be appropriate.

Discussion

7.3.1 On p. 29, the authors refer to “the morality of pointing” and cite McNeill (2003). This reference is mysterious and unexplained. McNeill himself uses the word “morality” just once in his chapter (although he uses “moral” several times).

Other comments.

p. 2, Introduction: This paragraph is somewhat tendentious. The author should stick with the problem at hand.

p. 2, sec. 1.1: The use of space seems not to be inevitable in signed languages, as is pointed out later.

p. 4, line 107: Throughout the paper, the use of the word “apparition” is inappropriate. In English, an “apparition” is what Juan Diego reported when he claimed to have seen the Virgin of Guadalupe. Please substitute the word “appearance”.

p. 5, FN 1. I don’t understand the second sentence of this footnote.

p. 7, line 1 of 3.2. Indicate that there were apparently a total of 23 participants across the three communities.

p. 9: Section 4 is out of place and belongs in the introduction to this paper. This section is reporting the background to this study.

p. 12, line 4: The use of “major” here is a translation error from the Spanish dedo major “middle finger”.

p. 12, second line of 4.2. Use the plural here: ‘r-loci’.

p. 12, line 5 of 4.2. How did the authors arrive at the total of 432 items per participant? I wasn’t able to figure this out.

p. 18: “institutionalized sign languages”. Word choice: "institutionalized" means that a person is confined, say, to a mental hospital. “Institutional” would be better. But I believe the standard terms are “national” or “Deaf community” sign languages.

Author Response

I clarified this point in the discussion.

Regarding the abstract use of space in Western cultures, it seems that for sign languages that evolved in these settings, the evolution of the signing space was less constrained.

Now, in the case of national signed languages in non-Western countries, most of them have been influenced by previous national sign language such as ASL or LSF for instance. Additionally, the urban setting tends to favor the use of the egocentric FoR even in non-Western countries (even among speakers). So, we usually tend to see a rapid shift towards a more abstract use of the signing space in these linguistic settings.

I have had he paper revised by a native English speaker who is also a linguist.

Other more specific comments follow below:

Issues of linguistic description

2, line 46-7: The text indicates that plain verbs in a language such as ASL “have a semantics oriented to .” I believe it would be more appropriate to use the term “experiencer”.

Thank you for this comment. I modified it.

9, line 234: Please clarify the comment about the coding of “anaphoric reference”. What’s the relevance, for example, of handshape? Were the authors coding the handshape of the pointing sign that was used to refer to an R-locus?

I modified the formulation using “the coding of the pronouns”. I wanted to consider handshapes as it could have been relevant but I deleted the section on form analysis as it is more a side matters and does not have a major impact on the current discussion.

9, line 239: The use of the term “pronoun marking” is unclear. Is this the indication of loci in space or is this what agreeing verbs do? It is in fact the properties of the agreement verb (witness GIVE vs. TAKE) that signify whether the referent of a given locus is the subject or object of that verb.

Well, this is where I think I do not make myself clear. I first used the term “overt pronouns” but reviewers weren’t satisfied either. In order to, as you mention, distinguish GIVE vs. TAKE, you want first to make clear where the arguments are in space. But this should be previous to performing the verb in space. If there is a woman and a man interacting where is the man and the woman only if you perform just the verb GIVE or TAKE? One has to put first the pronouns in the signing space as R-loci. This is what I am talking about here.

I modified the formulation to: “Placing pronoun in the signing space is essential for agreement as it distinguishes the agent from the recipient in order to inflect the verb in space accordingly.”

I also added translation to the examples, I hope this will make the difference clearer between all the verb inflection

9, line 262: Participants do not create anaphorical referents; the referent is in the real or imagined world. The participants instead established loci by which they could refer back to Personae 1-3.

I deleted this section.

13, heading to 4.2.2. I might instead say “The use of space for pronominal reference”.

I modified it.

15: There is a potential confusion here in the use of the term “plain verb”. The authors use it both to refer to the class of verbs identified by Padden (1983) (p. 2) and to verbs that are not marked for agreement. Note that Padden’s 1983 plain verbs typically lack the center-in or center-out movement described on p. 15 inasmuch as those verbs are generally body-anchored. With regard to the data from YMSL, the authors could discuss “uninflected” or “nonagreeing verbs”.

That is indeed correct for Padden (1983). However, I relied on the classification proposed by Padden et al. (2009) for ABSL. Authors oppose spatial verbs and the rest of the verb as “plain verbs”. But, as you point out, this is not really satisfying. I will use the category you propose “uninflected verbs”.

16, Figure 10: The subscripted notations used in these examples seem on their face to be more or less standard, but their use here is confusing. The examples in Fig. 10 are all supposed to show plain verbs, but the notation would suggest that these verbs are agreeing. In (b), the gloss for the buoy includes the subscript P1, apparently indicating that the signer is referring to Persona 1 in the stimulus; see Fig. 2. According to the authors, this signer—see Fig. 6—apparently shows agreement with the “ordinal loci” (p. 12, line 314) on such buoys. So, why is the verb TAKE in (c) coded as a plain verb? The signer’s gaze and the starting point of TAKE both seem consistent with agreement.

I changed the class name to Uninflected verbs. I hope this is less confusing. These verbs and indeed performed in space, but the starting point and the end point does not correspond to previously established pronouns ins space. I think the confusion came from my notation which is what the signer means but not that she is doing grammatically. I modified it. She is performing the verb GAVE which semantically implies arguments. But they are not marked on the verb and were not specified in space before. The case of buoys is a bit more complex, but I don’t explain in detail as it is not too relevant for this paper. Although in one case she does move her finger from the dominant hand between the index and major of the NDH to mark agreement. But is it space? It is more an iconic strategy than rather double agreement using R-loci which is much more complex and abstract.

Gaze is not relevant here. There are examples of double agreement verbs with no gaze. Gaze and phonology are very complicated issue in YMSL…

A related problem appears in (f) and (g): if these verbs are plain verbs, why do the authors use a notation that would suggest that they are agreeing verbs?

I modified it. See my previous comment.

The authors need to discuss their use of these subscripts in their methods sections on data coding (sections 3.3 & 4.1).

I modified them and made them homogenous.

16, line 420: Here the authors need to distinguish between regular and backwards agreeing verbs.

You are correct. I added it to explain single agreement verbs which rely on this construction.

16, line 414: The notion that, early in the emergence of verb agreement, movement might be restricted to the sagittal axis has been explored by other authors, notably I. Meir & colleagues. The authors of the current paper should discuss this.

I added this in several places. Basically, the idea of uninflected verb is exactly that, signers perform the verb in a neutral space (the sagittal axis in this case) to say that an action is performed but not specifying arguments (at least on the verb itself).

18, Fig. 12 caption: Why is this utterance glossed with the passive “is passed”?

I corrected it.

Results

22, lines 547-550: I believe that the authors have introduced some confusion in their discussion of the terminology (rotated and unrotated representations) used in Senghas (2003). See her Figure 1 on p. 518; the authors cite this image in line 550. This figure shows the woman giving a cup to the man on her right—who, from the viewer’s perspective, is on the left side of the video image. As described by the authors, the woman is giving a cup to a man on her left.

I am so sorry! I guess I got confused myself. I modified the text in order to correctly reflect what is in Senghas’ figure 1.

23: Please be more precise: On p. 23, line, the authors write “Another issue, somehow related to the use of FoRs….” The word “somehow” needs to be replaced.

I modified the formulation

23: Table 5. I don’t understand what scores are being correlated here. I’m also concerned that this statistical analysis may not be appropriate.

I won’t go into detail as I deleted this section but the analysis shows that there is a strong correlation between the use of the signing space for R-loci and the types of agreement.

Discussion

I put emphasis on the condition of truth which, indeed, is more relevant to this section.

Other comments.

2, Introduction: This paragraph is somewhat tendentious. The author should stick with the problem at hand.

I modified the introduction, as well as most of the paper to stick with the issue.

2, sec. 1.1: The use of space seems not to be inevitable in signed languages, as is pointed out later.

True, I modified the sentence to “In sign languages, the use of space can be fundamental to express linguistic forms and structures.”

4, line 107: Throughout the paper, the use of the word “apparition” is inappropriate. In English, an “apparition” is what Juan Diego reported when he claimed to have seen the Virgin of Guadalupe. Please substitute the word “appearance”.

Thank you for this correction and the culturally appropriate reference!

5, FN 1. I don’t understand the second sentence of this footnote.

Sorry, indeed this was confusing. I modified it to “Signers now live in two separate villages: Chemax and Tixhualactun”

7, line 1 of 3.2. Indicate that there were apparently a total of 23 participants across the three communities.

That’s correct. I made that clear in section “3.2. Participants”.

9: Section 4 is out of place and belongs in the introduction to this paper. This section is reporting the background to this study.

I moved part of this section in the introduction. Thank you for this suggestion.

12, line 4: The use of “major” here is a translation error from the Spanish dedo major“middle finger”.

No, it’s a mistake from French (le majeur)… not that’s any better!

12, second line of 4.2. Use the plural here: ‘r-loci’.
12, line 5 of 4.2. How did the authors arrive at the total of 432 items per participant? I wasn’t able to figure this out.

I’m sorry this was a previous calculus for all participants’ responses. It’s 36 items per participants.

18: “institutionalized sign languages”. Word choice: "institutionalized" means that a person is confined, say, to a mental hospital. “Institutional” would be better. But I believe the standard terms are “national” or “Deaf community” sign languages.

Thank you for this correction! Indeed, I always wander why people were so reluctant with this terminology. I now understand… Also, “national” or “Deaf community” sign languages are indeed commonly used, but they don’t capture the institutional character of a language (especially the language transmission), that is, being taught at school or relying on an established grammar. National sign language only means it is recognized nationwide, but does not say much on the form of transmission of such language and Deaf community is even worse (at the terminology level in our present case) as if only indicate that the language is used in social grouping but does not say how it is transmitted (it could be within informal gatherings, deaf clubs, etc.).

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

REVIEW: Intergenerational evolution in the use of space for pronominal 2 reference and verbal agreement in Yucatec Maya Sign Language

This paper is a detailed, thorough description of the emergence of properties associated with what sign language linguists call "verb agreement" in Yucatec Maya Sign Language (YMSL). The paper's stated goal is to analyze the variation in forms used for agreement, but the analysis goes beyond verbs and beyond agreement, and examines verbs, the pronouns the verbs agree with, and the alignment between the two. I especially like the discussion of rotated and unrotated forms, and the authors' explanation for why the YMSL signers prefer unrotated forms, which is argued to be tied to the system of spatial cognition in their culture. There are several improvements that I suggest the authors make.

X. English/Style: The text needs serious copyediting. The authors appear to be non-native English writers and the paper is full of mistakes in subject-verb agreement, as well as other grammatical errors. Some specific points:

a) The authors use Persona instead of "person" for 1sg, 2sg, 3sg person, and I'm not sure why, if the paper is for an English audience, the authors don't use the more standard labels for these terms.
b) The call out for each of the figures appears as " Error! Reference source not found." in the text. These call outs need to be fixed.

My substantive comments progress chronologically through the sections of the paper.

A. Introduction: The authors review the work done on verb agreement and on pronouns in the Introduction. Some specific suggestions to improve this section would be the following:

Variation in "institutionalized" sign languages and NSL: There is quite a bit of variation in "institutionalized" (authors term) sign languages, such as BSL and ASL, and in the emerging sign language NSL, with regard to these devices. A discussion of Schembri et al. (2018) for BSL and Flaherty (2014) for NSL would be helpful.
In Table 8, later in the paper, "institutionalized" sign languages, have only one device checked (R-loci) This is not correct. BSL, ASL and many other older sign languages use all of the devices mentioned, as for example, Liddell's work on buoys in ASL supports. The variation in languages such as BSL and ASL may be discourse related or explained by presence/absence of the arguments, but there is variation, and this should be acknowledged.
The alignment of pronouns verb loci: The authors hint at the issue of alignment in Section 7, but they address it only in the context of rotation and non-rotation. Signers may use pronominal points or spatially located nouns, and they may also use loci in space in directional verbs, but still might not align the locations in a consistent way. This is something that might be investigated further. This may be due to rotation differences, or simply inconsistency between pronominals and verbs.

B. Methods: the authors should list the properties that were coded in ELAN. It is important to know all properties that were annotated for the analysis, and how, if at all, they contributed to the analysis.

C. Analyses: Some specific points:

One important point to mention is whether pronouns and verb agreement enter the language at the same historical moment, or if one (pronouns or verb agreement) appeared first in the current data set.
None of your figures have error bars, and it is important to know the variation by signer. Please add error bars wherever possible, possibly reformatting the figures to do so. I think it would also be very helpful to see individual data in an appendix for Figure 9 and Figure 17, and possibly Table 7.
I agree with the authors that center-in or center-out strategy is not verb agreement, but a type of directionality (inflection if you will) meaning "towards" or "away from" the signer. It would be hard to argue that this is agreement because there the movement indicates transfer but to/from no particular locations. Does this lack of agreement co-occur with lack of nominals (in the form of NPs or pronouns).

D. Discussion: At the end of the paper, the authors state that signers become more symbolic as time passes. After all of the work detailed described here (and even with the caveat of small Ns as the authors duly note) it would be very useful for the authors to offer a ranking of the factors involved. For example, in several places in the text, it seems like authors want to say that the individuals are consistent in themselves. Is this the case? Is variation between signers, not within signers? We see the most variation in Chicán, but most of this can be explained by cohort. My question, therefore, is this: can the authors propose a hierarchy of factors contributing to variation:(i) intra-subject (no consistency within subject), (ii) inter-subject variation (i.e., individual consistency), (iii) interactional group or cohort, or (iv) village.

E. Conclusion: It seems to me that the authors want to argue (at least weakly) against some sort of universal progression in any of the devices used. If this conclusion is what the authors want to convey, they should say this clearly in the conclusion.

References

Schembri, A. & Cormier, K. & Fenlon, J., (2018) “Indicating verbs as typologically unique constructions: Reconsidering verb ‘agreement’ in sign languages”, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 3(1), p.89. doi: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.468

Flaherty, M. 2014. The emergence of argument structural devices in Nicaraguan Sign Language Doctoral Dissertation, University of Chicago.

Author Response

This is my response to reviewer 1’scomments. I want to sincerely thank the reviewer for these challenging and constructive comments which really helped me figure some issues out and improve the manuscript. I do hope I managed to provide satisfactory answers to the reviewers’ comments and issues and that the paper is now clearer and more readable.

I answered in the text below each comment using bold script.

REVIEW: Intergenerational evolution in the use of space for pronominal 2 reference and verbal agreement in Yucatec Maya Sign Language

English/Style:The text needs serious copyediting. The authors appear to be non-native English writers and the paper is full of mistakes in subject-verb agreement, as well as other grammatical errors.

I had the paper revised by an English native speaker.

Some specific points:

a) The authors use Persona instead of "person" for 1sg, 2sg, 3sg person, and I'm not sure why, if the paper is for an English audience, the authors don't use the more standard labels for these terms.

No, the reviewer did not understand this I’m afraid. The Persona represents the people in the video. I used this label to refer to the way they are placed by the signers in the surrounding space. This way, it allows to appreciate if they used a (un)rotated strategy.

b) The call out for each of the figures appears as " Error! Reference source not found." in the text. These call outs need to be fixed.

I’m afraid it is an incompatibility between computer or software. Other reviewers complained with the same issue but it was okay on mine (even though it was a different archive). Please do not worry, this will be fixed by the Journal editors.

My substantive comments progress chronologically through the sections of the paper.

I want to sincerely thank you, all your comments were very constructive and did help me to (hopefully) better the manuscript.

Introduction: The authors review the work done on verb agreement and on pronouns in the Introduction. Some specific suggestions to improve this section would be the following:

Variation in "institutionalized" sign languages and NSL: There is quite a bit of variation in "institutionalized" (authors term) sign languages, such as BSL and ASL, and in the emerging sign language NSL, with regard to these devices. A discussion of Schembri et al. (2018) for BSL and Flaherty (2014) for NSL would be helpful.

I do not mix both, I mentioned both as two different examples. I revised the papers you mentioned but due to space limitation I cannot go in more details on the differences.

In Table 8, later in the paper, "institutionalized" sign languages, have only one device checked (R-loci) This is not correct. BSL, ASL and many other older sign languages use all of the devices mentioned, as for example, Liddell's work on buoys in ASL supports. The variation in languages such as BSL and ASL may be discourse related or explained by presence/absence of the arguments, but there is variation, and this should be acknowledged.

Thank you for this comment. You are completely right. I have tried to softened my claim in explaining what the check mark means. However, I am no specialist in ASL or other SLs, so I won’t go into much details, as there are even debate within this field (as shown for instance by Schembri in his work on the use of constructed action in Australian SL). I added a paragraph in the text and the table to explain what I meant by this comparison which is superficial but nonetheless useful and I think necessary to pursue.

The alignment of pronouns verb loci: The authors hint at the issue of alignment in Section 7, but they address it only in the context of rotation and non-rotation. Signers may use pronominal points or spatially located nouns, and they may also use loci in space in directional verbs, but still might not align the locations in a consistent way. This is something that might be investigated further. This may be due to rotation differences, or simply inconsistency between pronominals and verbs.

This is my hypothesis. I tried to clarify it further in the revised version, and I will explore this in another paper using natural data (from natural conversation and not tasks or elicitation).

Methods: the authors should list the properties that were coded in ELAN. It is important to know all properties that were annotated for the analysis, and how, if at all, they contributed to the analysis.

I added a paragraph on this point. Thank you for this comment.

Analyses:Some specific points:

One important point to mention is whether pronouns and verb agreement enter the language at the same historical moment, or if one (pronouns or verb agreement) appeared first in the current data set.

Apparently, it would seem that they appear at the same time. But I do not have enough data to support any claims regarding this issue.

None of your figures have error bars, and it is important to know the variation by signer. Please add error bars wherever possible, possibly reformatting the figures to do so. I think it would also be very helpful to see individual data in an appendix for Figure 9 and Figure 17, and possibly Table 7.

I added some bar errors when relevant. I also modified some figures and included a discussion on individual responses which I think will answer your comment.

I agree with the authors that center-in or center-out strategy is not verb agreement, but a type of directionality (inflection if you will) meaning "towards" or "away from" the signer. It would be hard to argue that this is agreement because there the movement indicates transfer but to/from no particular locations. Does this lack of agreement co-occur with lack of nominals (in the form of NPs or pronouns).

I clarified this point added two examples (see new figures 4 and 5). It depends, some signers first mention the agent, some don’t. The NP does not seem to be a prerequisite for the use of any strategy.

Discussion:At the end of the paper, the authors state that signers become more symbolic as time passes. After all of the work detailed described here (and even with the caveat of small Ns as the authors duly note) it would be very useful for the authors to offer a ranking of the factors involved. For example, in several places in the text, it seems like authors want to say that the individuals are consistent in themselves. Is this the case? Is variation between signers, not within signers? We see the most variation in Chicán, but most of this can be explained by cohort. My question, therefore, is this: can the authors propose a hierarchy of factors contributing to variation:(i) intra-subject (no consistency within subject), (ii) inter-subject variation (i.e., individual consistency), (iii) interactional group or cohort, or (iv) village.

Regarding the ranking of the factors involved it is very difficult to provide one with certainty.

Regarding the individual variation, thank to your comment, I revised the data and provided an individual analysis in Fig 11 to 13.

What seems to be happening (which I have detailed in the text) is that there are 3 phases: (1) no variation but no use of space, (2) use of space with variations, signers seem to explore several strategies and, (3) use of signing space which implies less variation and more systematicity (also what NSL research seem to point to)

Conclusion:It seems to me that the authors want to argue (at least weakly) against some sort of universal progression in any of the devices used. If this conclusion is what the authors want to convey, they should say this clearly in the conclusion.

No, I do argue for common stages of progression. However, YMSL show that what this process might not involve as much time or input as previously discussed. I added a section on bilingualism which might also have an impact.

References

Flaherty, M. 2014. The emergence of argument structural devices in Nicaraguan Sign Language Doctoral Dissertation, University of Chicago.

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper is a highly interesting and important investigation of reference and ‘verb agreement’ in Yucatec Maya Sign Language (YMSL). This paper has the potential to contribute a nice set of data to the existing literature. I have several suggestions I would like to see the authors address in their revision of this paper. They concern:

1) The treatment of anaphoric expressions and an assumption that the forms observed are pronouns. The claim that indexicals are pronouns in YMSL should be substantiated with additional evidence or reframed in more neutral terms. In addition, the overemphasis on pronouns leads this paper to downplay the presence of other possible anaphoric expressions
2) The hypotheses could be further clarified and/or integrated with the existing data and arguments in the literature
3) More detail about the method and experiments is needed. What were the instructions given to the participants, was this a communication task? These details are important for understanding possible pragmatic pressures
4) The pattern of findings and their interpretation is murky at times due to coding choices and data presentation

1) Anaphoric expressions and pronouns

There is an assumption in this paper that the forms observed are pronouns in YMSL (e.g., Line 348: “Study 1: Overt pronouns”). If there is an analysis of IX as a pronoun in YMSL, the authors should include discussion of that work. If not, I suggest adopting more neutral description of the form (indexical, IX).

It is important to keep in mind that in ASL and other sign languages, IX is used for several functions (Meier & Lillo-Martin 2013) and has been analyzed differently: as a definite determiner (Irani 2016; MacLaughlin 1997; Neidle et al. 2000), a demonstrative (Koulidobrova & Lillo-Martin 2016), and a pronoun (Lillo-Martin & Klima 1990, MacLaughlin 1997). Throughout the paper, the authors seem to assume that a pronoun is conceptually the only anaphoric expression of interest and assume that the only possible analysis of the form is as a pronoun. For example, on line 201: “In order to create a reference to a person in the discourse (i.e., a pronoun)…” The use of “i.e.” here suggests that a pronoun is the only way we have of referring to a person in discourse. But, of course, there are many other anaphoric expressions available, at least in other languages (and I don’t think the authors are claiming that YMSL only has one anaphoric expression), including: definites, demonstratives, bare nouns, and null arguments.

To be clear, I am not proposing that the authors present a formal analysis of IX. It’s plenty sufficient to acknowledge in the introduction that IX has received many different analyses in different sign languages along with the appropriate citations, in a manner parallel to the brief overview of the debate around verb agreement in sign languages that is given in the introduction.

I have a number of questions about the other strategies that were coded which I raise in #4 below.

2) Hypotheses

Lines 173-180: The authors seem to be laying out the hypotheses for the emergence of verbal agreement as mutually exclusive and/or in opposition to each other: as part of the natural evolution of language, as influenced by time and/or size of the community, or as dependent on the absence/presence of the use of IX and loci for referents. This seems to me to be a unified hypothesis: the development of the use of space for referents/loci is a necessary precursor to the development of agreement verbs; generational time and/or size of the community may affect the speed of these developments.

I would urge the authors to reframe the hypothesis. I think it is really a more interesting one and I think it will better highlight the contribution of their paper: explicitly testing the contingency of verbal agreement on the use of space for referents. As part of this, I would suggest further expanding on the De Vos finding and integrating it into the body of findings presented in the introducing rather than presenting it as in opposition to the findings from other emerging sign languages.

Relatedly, the authors use ‘agreement’ to refer to both verb agreement and word order. Given the centrality of these two devices in prior work on argument structure in emerging languages, I might suggest establishing crisper distinctions via dedicated terminology: argument structure to refer to the marking of the relationship between verbs and their arguments, word order to mean the ordering of syntactic constituents in a language, and verb(al) agreement to refer to agreement morphology on verbs.

3) Method

What instructions were given to the participants? Did they receive any training trials (with feedback)? Was this a communication task, where they were describing the different videos to a partner or were they describing the videos to the experimenter or the camera?

Such methodological information is always relevant and in this particular case is even more so given the focus on anaphoric expressions. Anaphoric expressions vary in the amount of information they carry and are discourse sensitive. The pragmatic pressures of the task may affect the amount of information signers choose to include in their utterances.

Knowing these details will also help the reader interpret claims like: “In the present case, even if when signers would only rely on word-order, not enough information is conveyed to understand what is going on in the scene (i.e., to understand who is doing what to whom)” (Lines 396-397). How was the informativity assessed? Was this a communication task where the communication partner had to select which event was described and thus it was inferred via incorrect choices that the communication partner did not understand the signer due to lack of information?

4) Data coding and presentation

Related to the different analyses, it is useful to distinguish between the initial point (which creates a R-locus) and may accompany a full description/NP and subsequent points (which anaphorically refer back to the referent) and are less likely to occur with a NP. For example:

MAN IX_A WOMAN IX_B MAN IX_C. IX_B BOOK GIVE-TO IX_A.

Were the points used to establish loci coded separately from the points used to refer back to a locus in this dataset? There are a number of findings in the literature demonstrating that the choice of anaphoric expression can depend on whether it is used to introduce, maintain, or reintroduce. It would be good to know whether such descriptions were produced and when different referring expressions (pointing, classifiers, etc.) were used in introducing vs. referring back to a referent. It would also help interpret “no marking” (line 411). For example, if pointing was used to introduce the referents and then a directional verb that moved from one locus to another was produced, without subsequent points, that would presumably be coded as “no marking” but still carry information about the arguments. For example:

MAN IX_A WOMAN IX_B MAN IX_C. IX_B-GIVE-TO-IX_A.

Given that anaphoric expressions are often interchangeable (the choice of which expression is used often depends on when it is used, e.g., to introduce a referent vs. to refer back to a referent), I am curious why other referring expressions, such as nouns, were not coded and included in this paper? Indeed, if the analysis of IX as a pronoun here is correct, we might expect another referential element in the sentence (such as an antecedent NP) to which the pronoun refers. By not including other anaphoric expressions, I think the authors place themselves in a weaker position to address the main, exciting question of this paper: how the grammatical use of space for marking events emerges and the degree to which directional verbs are dependent on pronominal pointing. Note that the literature (e.g., Lillo-Martin 1991) takes the loci used in sign language directional verbs to be the same loci as used in pronominals.

The description and analysis of buoys deserves consideration. For instance, the definition of buoys given the paper (Liddell’s) is that they are “the symbolic association between human digits and list of numbers” (446-447). The authors state that they consider them an “iconic” strategy” (460). In what ways are buoys symbolic and in what ways are they iconic?

In general, more examples of the descriptions (particularly the ones categorized as lacking overt pronouns) would be helpful in interpreting these findings. What did the descriptions produced by signers from the Trascorral village (100% no marking) look like (line 477)? Did they contain any information about the nouns? E.g., WOMAN GIVE or WOMAN GIVE MAN. Did they just contain the verb?

I am confused about the authors’ choice to collapse the data. In the introduction, the authors take great pains to explain how the three villages are quite separate communities with signers having very little contact with signers from other villages. The previous section describes how different the villages are in their use of anaphoric expressions.

Given the small number of signers in the three communities, it is not particularly informative to collapse two signers into one bar. A bar that shows 50% use of one anaphoric expression and 50% of another anaphoric expression could mean that the two signers used both expressions, one used one expression and the other the other, or some intermediate pattern. I would suggest either getting rid of Fig. 9 altogether and providing a description of the data in a table or graphing the three villages separately, with each individual represented. Knowing when the variation that is observed reflects variation within individuals and within a community and along which dimensions is necessary for understanding these patterns of emergence.

Line 498: Fig 9. Only two Trascorral signers are shown in Fig. 9 but three are shown in Fig 8.

Line 479: Fig 8 is missing the legend text for no marking (dark grey).

Additional comments:

Given the analyses focusing on use of rotated vs. unrotated representations, it would be helpful if the authors include a brief discussion of this in other sign languages (beyond mention of this in their summary of the Senghas finding) as well as the cross-cultural variation in use of frames of references.

This is a stylistic point, there is an overabundance of direct quotes in the introduction. I think it is best practice to reserve quotes for ideas that must absolutely be conveyed in their original form, word for word. Theories, definitions, and summaries of findings don’t really need to be quoted verbatim. Here is an example of an unnecessary direct quote, lines 124-126: ‘Senghas finds that while first-cohort signers accept both a rotated or an unrotated layout for expressing spatially modulated verbs, second-cohort signers “all consistently applied a rotated representation [...] and limited their acceptance of the event depictions accordingly” (ibid.: 531).’)

Line 75: “Crucially, the use of the R-Locus analysis, implies a symbolic use of the signing space which is, as we will discuss later, far from being “natural” or universal.” This is a small point, but I find the word natural here along with the scare quotes to be jarring. I’m not sure what the authors are trying to communicate. The use of signing space as described here has been attested in many sign languages. Surely then, this is natural in the way we mean when we talk about natural languages, namely that it is readily produced, comprehended, and learned by members of a language community. Note that natural and universal are not the same thing. A device can be not universal, i.e., not attested in all/an overwhelming majority of languages, but still organic to the language.

Lines 195-200: “In small communities especially where emerging sign languages arise, because sign names for unknown referents do not exist, signers have to find creative ways to refer to the people they are talking about. Also, usually, there is no need to talk about people in an abstract way. For instance, a statement like “someone is doing something to another person” is impossible to represent in YMSL.” I would like to see citations for these points. If these are just field observations of YMSL, it’s worth noting that.

Lines 214-223: There seems to be an error with the numbering of the sections (they’re all numbered 0).

Line 469: “In the task, signers had potentially to indicate 3 Persona for each of the 12 video stimuli, so each participant could (ideally) indicate 36 overt pronouns.” But, of course, signers could produce more anaphoric expressions since referents could be introduced and then referred back to (resulting in at least two anaphoric expressions produced for the two referents involved in the event).

The authors seem to be using “Studies” to refer to different analyses on the same dataset. I would suggest labelling the different sections as analyses rather than studies (unless these are different datasets, collected with different stimuli or at different times, in which case, that should be clarified).

Lines 527-528: “which implies that pronouns are not a crucial feature and rely heavily on context or inference.” I think this could be more concretely phrased. It’s not that points are or are not a crucial feature but that, like anaphoric expressions in many languages, they can be dropped when the context allows.

Line 542: Figure 11: The first panel “No” is not necessary. By “no marking of the pronoun,” I assume the authors mean no marking of the referent?

Table 8: The single value checked for ‘Institutionalized SL’ is misleading. There are verbs in institutionalized sign languages, such as ASL and BSL, that do not show agreement. In addition, verb agreement seems optional (hence the debate about whether directional verbs are true agreeing verbs or something else, like clitics). In general, this kind of checking off of boxes yields a very categorical take on languages and overlooks the large amount of well-documented variation within languages.

Author Response

This is my response to reviewer 2’scomments. I want to sincerely thank the reviewer for these challenging and constructive comments which really helped me figure some issues out and improve the manuscript. I do hope I managed to provide satisfactory answers to the reviewers’ comments and issues and that the paper is now clearer and more readable.

I answered in the text below each comment using bold script.

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

1) The treatment of anaphoric expressions and an assumption that the forms observed are pronouns. The claim that indexicals are pronouns in YMSL should be substantiated with additional evidence or reframed in more neutral terms. In addition, the overemphasis on pronouns leads this paper to downplay the presence of other possible anaphoric expressions

I sincerely thank you for this comment, and it helped me clarify also this issue. I put some clearer definitions in the text.

2) The hypotheses could be further clarified and/or integrated with the existing data and arguments in the literature

I tried to clarify it further in the revised version.

3) More detail about the method and experiments is needed. What were the instructions given to the participants, was this a communication task? These details are important for understanding possible pragmatic pressures

I added a paragraph in the method section clarifying this point.

4) The pattern of findings and their interpretation is murky at times due to coding choices and data presentation

As also suggested by other reviewers, I revised some codification and presented the data in a much clearer and hopefully relevant manner.

1) Anaphoric expressions and pronouns

I added a clarification on this point.

Thank you for this comment. I used several definitions distinguishing between anaphoric references, and pronouns. It actually helped me lot to make a clearer argument.

I added a note specifying this point.

I have a number of questions about the other strategies that were coded which I raise in #4 below.

2) Hypotheses

I clarified this point and make clear I follow to some extent DeVos’ hypothesis. I also added another point regarding the effect of bilingualism and input of a second language.

I took out the section on word order in the first part of the paper, as it was not so relevant and I have limited space. I also developed a bit more this issue in the discussion.

3) Method

I explained the methodology in more detail in section 3.2.

I clarified this point also in the section 3. It is important to take into account that it was the same task for every signer, and yet, many show systematicity in their answer, so these tendencies let us to think that all understood the task correctly and hence that it has some validity. This does not mean however that signers would do the same in more natural settings or in other contexts. This will probably be a study for another paper using natural data.

4) Data coding and presentation

MAN IX_A WOMAN IX_B MAN IX_C. IX_B BOOK GIVE-TO IX_A.

MAN IX_A WOMAN IX_B MAN IX_C. IX_B-GIVE-TO-IX_A.

I revised much of the paper taking this point into account. Further explanations of this are provided in section 4.1.1 and 7.

I clarified this point, explaining how I differ from Liddell’s analysis.

I added one example of Trascorral, showing the typical answer pattern. Even with an interlocutor who did not see the video, they provided less info than signers from the other villages.

Thank you. Indeed, that was a first attempt at presenting the data but it failed to convey what I wanted to show. I added a new table and figure (table 3 and fig.10).

Given the small number of signers in the three communities, it is not particularly informative to collapse two signers into one bar. A bar that shows 50% use of one anaphoric expression and 50% of another anaphoric expression could mean that the two signers used both expressions, one used one expression and the other the other, or some intermediate pattern. I would suggest either getting rid of Fig. 9 altogether and providing a description of the data in a table or graphing the three villages separately, with each individual represented. Knowing when the variation that is observed reflects variation within individuals and within a community and along which dimensions is necessary for understanding these patterns of emergence.

I modify this analysis and revise the figure, see new fig. 11 to 13.

Line 498: Fig 9. Only two Trascorral signers are shown in Fig. 9 but three are shown in Fig 8.

Yes, because I separated the deaf from the CODA.

Line 479: Fig 8 is missing the legend text for no marking (dark grey).

Additional comments:

There are actually none I could find. There is another study but also on NSL by Gagne taking the same coding schemes which I also mention.

Gagne, Deanna. 2017. “With a Little Help from My Friends: The Contributions of a Peer Language Network on the Conventionalization of Space in an Emerging Language”. Doctoral Dissertations, julio. https://opencommons.uconn.edu/dissertations/1493.

Thank you for noting this. I took most of them and modified the text accordingly.

I modified and corrected this. The formulation was misleading and I made it clearer that there is a tendency but it might not appear at the same time or in every community. I also further clarified the distinction between universal and natural.

I added an example. Although she signers uses a plain verb. The intended sentence was: “someone caressed someone else”. The signer could only make sense of this statement as “a person I could not see caressed another person that I don’t know and who went away”. In her utterance, the signer did not once used an overt pronoun nor a sign name, only an inflection for 3sg on the verbs CARESS, go and walk. Although this example involves a plain verb, the difficulty or even impossibility for the signer to express neutral nouns or pronouns is significant. I hope this is convincing.

Lines 214-223: There seems to be an error with the numbering of the sections (they’re all numbered 0).

This is an incompatibility between programs. Other reviewers complained about the same issue, although it appears correctly on my computer (despite it was a different archive as the one I submitted). This will be corrected in the editing process.

Indeed, but this was not part of the task and the 36 possible responses provides a basis for comparison. Actually, none of the signer did introduce any other reference.

The sections were renamed.

I took this sentence away as the rest of the paper is clearer now and I deal with this issue elsewhere.

Line 542: Figure 11: The first panel “No” is not necessary. By “no marking of the pronoun,” I assume the authors mean no marking of the referent?

I modified this and it is now NO MARKING

Thank you for this comment. Another reviewer raised the same issue. I added a disclaimer in the legend of the table and added a paragraph on this particular point. I hope this is now softened and less problematic. I know the table is far from ideal, but I wanted to make an attempt at comparison between SLs, otherwise the whole argument is not so relevant and I think we need to have more comparative works, especially when dealing with emerging SLs.

Reviewer 3 Report

Review of “Intergenerational evolution in the use of space for pronominal reference and verbal agreement in Yucatec Maya Sign Language”.

This fascinating and important paper examines the structure of ditransitive constructions in order understand how (overt) pronominal reference is expressed and whether/how verbs are “inflected” for “agreement” in the context of inter-generational transmission. The overarching problem is that the author has not staked a claim to a particular position, nor have they argued for a position in a convincing manner. A major issue underlying this is that the categories employed in the analysis are not clearly explicated or deployed. Throughout the paper, the author compares others’ analyses but then states their own position without motivating the differences, or showing why their approach is better (i.e. why it has more analytic power, how it explains something that other approaches have missed, etc.).

For example, on p. 12, it is reported that Liddell “defines buoys as the symbolic association between human digits and lists of items (usually numbers).” This sort of association occurs in YMSLs, apparently, but what do we learn from that fact? To explain the difference between Liddell’s analysis of buoys and the authors’, we are simply told that Liddell analyses buoys “using blended space theory” while the author considers them “direct” iconic representations. Why? And what would need to be demonstrated to show one vs. the other? Problems like this are included in the review below. Without terms like “iconic”, “symbolic”, “linguistic”, “gestural” being more clearly defined, conceptually, it is unclear what the analysis that follows really demonstrates, and why it would matter if it were clear. The conclusion, in a similar manner, claims that the rapidity of evolution of language is what we learn from this case. It seems to me there has been significant work done to collect a rich data set and I would be shocked if all this work could really do was reinforce what we already know, with some small adjustments regarding time frame. The author should step back and ask—what is really important about this place and how people communicate there? How can agreement be a window onto those differences?

In short, I think this work has much more to contribute than it is currently claiming. In clarifying the concepts used in the analysis, much progress will be made toward that goal. I have tried to provide some ideas below for how to achieve this, or general directions to go in.

Section 1.1. Agreement

Overall, the author has done an excellent job recounting a long-standing and complex set of debates about “agreement” in emerging and established sign languages. However, clarification of the author’s contribution is needed. For example, is DeVos (2012), in the author’s interpretation, arguing that the absence of metaphorical loci for referents has nothing to do with “natural evolution” of language? Putting natural evolution side by side with “absence of x” is where the framing breaks down in this section (page 4). What is the over-arching process that governs, or structures, such an absence? Is there a distinction to be drawn between “evolution” and diachronic change? Is there some other construct that can be deployed here? Is the absence of a particular feature linked to something other than innate capacities? This should be spelled out for readers who might not understand the backdrop of these debates and in order to clarify the author’s contribution. In addition, this framing should prefigure a “preference for geocentric frames,” i.e. where do such “cultural” preferences come from and does this oppose or complement or shift perspective vis-à-vis prior proposals? There is nothing in the “featural analysis”, for example that prepares us for an analysis of such preferences. Is the author building on that analysis to take “culture” into account (and what is culture?)? The degree to which the certain patterns obtain despite the lack of historical connection between communities seems very interesting. These consistencies are attributed to gestural repertoires shared across locales, but how would we know? Does this relate to certain widely shared structures and patterns across sign languages (with little to no known historical connection)? Some have attributed such similarities to modality. This is another debate you could think about in positioning this work by introducing “modality” as being in tension with “culture”—where both are clearly delimited, conceptually.

Section 1.2. Independent Pronouns

In the first part of this section, we learn that signed languages are interesting, pronominally, because “the space where pronouns are anchored in space will determine their syntactic role in the realization of verbal agreement”. I am not sure why we go directly from there to present/non-present, known/unknown in small communities and then back to mechanisms used widely across signed languages, including established signed languages operating at a national scale. The implication seems to be that if the community were larger, syntactic roles would be marked directly on the verb. But because it is a small community without sign names at their disposal, they “have to” come up with “creative” solutions. If this is not what you mean, you should clarify the relationship of that paragraph to the one that immediately follows it.

I would recommend, more generally, expanding and clarifying your discussion of the mechanisms signers have at their disposal for making reference to persons. There are many things here that will not be clear to readers, and that perhaps need to be considered more carefully for this analysis. First, is any reference to persons automatically equivalent to “pronominal reference”? If not, how does one account for the distinction that you introduce in the literature in the previous section between the R-locus analysis and the indicating analysis, where the same phenomena are considered linguistic (in this case it would be pronominal reference) and gestural (in this case, pointing gestures), depending on the theoretical framework? Both linguistic and non-linguistic pointing can accomplish the task of referring to persons. Second, the three strategies you introduce--(1) body as subject, (2) “symbolic” buoys, and (3) [deictic] reference—need to be clarified. Is body-as-subject used with a buoy? Are they interchangeable? What is a buoy (you define it later in the paper after you’ve already used it)? Is body as subject often the result of a type of deictic transposition? If so, isn’t this a more complex phenomenon than pronominal reference or person reference? What is “symbolic” about a buoy, as opposed to indexical, or iconic? Is a “buoy” related to anaphor? Is reference to persons in the immediate environment different than reference to persons previously introduced in the discourse? If so, how?

Section 4. Overt Pronouns

Instead of saying “like direct reported speech”, I would recommend looking into the literature on deixis and deictic transpositions. John Haviland has a piece titled “Projections, Transpositions, and Relativity” in the edited collection titled “Rethinking Relativity” (edited by Gumperz and Levinson). Hanks (1990)- “Referential Practice” would also be a good place to start. Transposition occurs when “I” does not refer to the speaker in the speech situation, but instead to a speaker (or thinker or actor, and so-on) on the narrative plane, or the “narrative event”. I think this would introduce some needed analytic distinctions between types of what you are calling “symbolic” space (another phrase that might be re-considered, since iconicity and indexicality seem very much foregrounded in the phenomena analyzed in this paper. And later on (bottom of p.10), you say that you are not clear on the semiotic status of points, but that the “space” is symbolic. What is “space” apart from the form that functions within it? Can space itself be symbolic? If not, then the symbolic status of the “space” must be relational, not essential, and the relevant elation needs to be specified). Because deictic transposition is intimately linked to perspective shift, and space rotation, these issues should be clarified in the revised draft of the paper.

Pointing and placing also need further elaboration and buoys again need further consideration. In what sense are these “symbolic”? Is starting with the pinky to list siblings motivated, iconically? Is this something that differs across sign languages (where you start counting for certain purposes, or in general?). You also refer to buoys as both symbolic and iconic. It’s not clear why you use one term in one case and the other in another case (both can be used together to describe the same thing, but you have to know why you’re using them). If you want to include these terms, they should do something analytically. As far as I can tell, they aren’t doing much for you and the easiest way to deal with this issue would be to remove them.

Overall, this paper is fascinating and stands to make a significant contribution to the field. I hope these revisions will make that contribution more clear.

Typos, spelling, etc. (not exhaustive)

us >> use (p. 1, line 28).
reveal >> reveals (p. 2, line 89).
Remove the word “has” from “NSL has emerged” (p. 3, line 104)
Remove “if” from before the quote (p. 3, line 136).
“used by already a sixth generations” >> “used by a sixth generation already” (p. 4, line 169).
“This paper proposes a similar argumentation…” (p. 4, line 177—similar to what? DeVos’s approach? Or Kegl, Senghas, Coppola, et al.?).
“the space where pronouns are anchored in space” >> “the space where pronouns are anchored” (p. 4, line 191).
“difference > distinction” (p. 4, line 194).
“disposition”? or “position”? Both are a little confusing for that sentence. (p. 5, line 211).
“pronouns” > “pronoun” (p. 9, line 362).
Inflected > inflect (p. 9, line 365)
Used >> use (p 10, line 387)
Put > puts (p. 10, line 4010.
Revise sentence on p. 10, lines 403-405.
Revise sentence lines 414-15
Revise sentence line 430

Author Response

This is my response to reviewer 3’scomments. I want to sincerely thank the reviewer for these challenging and constructive comments which really helped me figure some issues out and improve the manuscript. I do hope I managed to provide satisfactory answers to the reviewers’ comments and issues and that the paper is now clearer and more readable.

I answered in the text below each comment using bold script.

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Review of “Intergenerational evolution in the use of space for pronominal reference and verbal agreement in Yucatec Maya Sign Language”.

Thank you for your comment. I have tried in the revised version to clarify a bit more my position regarding the previous studies in the literature. I hope the discussion is now more relevant.

I clarified my position regarding Liddell’s. I explain in more detailed how buoys work. However, it should be noted that only one signer used this strategy. So, this is not a main focus in the paper.

Section 1.1. Agreement

I have clarified my position regarding DeVos’, which I follow to a certain extent. I added the possible influence of bilingualism or at least the impact of being acquainted with a second language.

Regarding the issue of other possible strategies, I clarify it in the paper. One is Word Order, but since the paper does not focus on this, I am only mentioning it. I provided additional examples of answers by the signers to give the reader a clearer idea of how the task was conducted and how signers handled it.

Section 1.2. Independent Pronouns

I expended this section.

The implication seems to be that if the community were larger, syntactic roles would be marked directly on the verb. But because it is a small community without sign names at their disposal, they “have to” come up with “creative” solutions. If this is not what you mean, you should clarify the relationship of that paragraph to the one that immediately follows it.

There are sign names. I am currently finishing a paper on this issue actually. I added an example (fig. 1) to show how a signer answers a statement with no clear referents.

Done.

First, is any reference to persons automatically equivalent to “pronominal reference”? If not, how does one account for the distinction that you introduce in the literature in the previous section between the R-locus analysis and the indicating analysis, where the same phenomena are considered linguistic (in this case it would be pronominal reference) and gestural (in this case, pointing gestures), depending on the theoretical framework? Both linguistic and non-linguistic pointing can accomplish the task of referring to persons.

You are right, this was not clear in the manuscript. I modified it and clarified the difference between anaphoric references and pronouns.

Second, the three strategies you introduce--(1) body as subject, (2) “symbolic” buoys, and (3) [deictic] reference—need to be clarified. Is body-as-subject used with a buoy? Are they interchangeable? What is a buoy (you define it later in the paper after you’ve already used it)? Is body as subject often the result of a type of deictic transposition? If so, isn’t this a more complex phenomenon than pronominal reference or person reference? What is “symbolic” about a buoy, as opposed to indexical, or iconic?

I clarified these issues in the paper.

Is a “buoy” related to anaphor?

Yes.

Is reference to persons in the immediate environment different than reference to persons previously introduced in the discourse? If so, how?

I explained in more detailed how anaphoric references work in the task.

Section 4. Overt Pronouns

I tried to clarified the comparison with direct reported speech, which is a process of deictic transposition directly encoded many languages in one form or another.

I further explained how space can be used symbolically, especially with the R-loci process with arbitrarily connect a point in empty space with a referent.

This is clarified. I explain in more detail why I consider buoys to be indexical and iconic.

Overall, this paper is fascinating and stands to make a significant contribution to the field. I hope these revisions will make that contribution more clear.

Thank you, I was really helped for me to have constructive comments and observations!

Typos, spelling, etc. (not exhaustive)

I correct all of these. Thank you for taking the time to point them out.

us >> use (p. 1, line 28).
reveal >> reveals (p. 2, line 89).
Remove the word “has” from “NSL has emerged” (p. 3, line 104)
Remove “if” from before the quote (p. 3, line 136).
“used by already a sixth generations” >> “used by a sixth generation already” (p. 4, line 169).
“This paper proposes a similar argumentation…” (p. 4, line 177—similar to what? DeVos’s approach? Or Kegl, Senghas, Coppola, et al.?).
“the space where pronouns are anchored in space” >> “the space where pronouns are anchored” (p. 4, line 191).
“difference > distinction” (p. 4, line 194).
“disposition”? or “position”? Both are a little confusing for that sentence. (p. 5, line 211).
“pronouns” > “pronoun” (p. 9, line 362).
Inflected > inflect (p. 9, line 365)
Used >> use (p 10, line 387)
Put > puts (p. 10, line 4010.
Revise sentence on p. 10, lines 403-405.
Revise sentence lines 414-15
Revise sentence line 430

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Review of Revised manuscript: "Intergenerational evolution in the use of space for 1 pronominal reference and verbal agreement in Yucatec Maya Sign Language"

The authors have done a very good job of responding to my comments on the first version of the manuscript. The text is a long, but it is very accessible to readers, and it is framed in a way that is interesting to readers of different disciples, including linguistics, psychology, and anthropology. There are a few, small substantive points that I call to the authors attention. In addition, as I read the new, revised version of the manuscript I noticed some typos, grammatical points, and points of clarification that I list below. After these last details are addressed, I believe the manuscript will be ready for publication. It is very interesting and important addition to the special issue, and I thank the authors for their contribution.

Substantive points

In general, I would suggest that in the interest in shortening the ms, the authors think about whether the information in associated tables and figures are redundant —e.g., Table 5 and Figure 22, but also perhaps earlier. If the information is redundant, perhaps the table can suffice.

line 223: Please just list these authors independently. Coppola's and Senghas's current work currently deviates considerably from that of Kegl, and has done so for a long time, so I would not treat them as one group. Coppola and Senghas's work reports more language features in homesign than does Kegl's work, and Coppola and Senghas also attribute more importance to social factors in the emergence of language than does Kegl.

Table 2/5: (i) If all of Gen 1 signers are deaf, please say this in the caption and in the table. It is not clear from the prose or table. (ii) "BB" as an abbreviation in Table 5, but no BB signers are mentioned in Table 2. You need to spell out what you mean by "BB" and perhaps re-visit your table of participants to include this category.

Figures 11-13. It took me a while to figure that the associated with each set of data is the cohort of that signer. It would be better to add some more information to make this clear (e.g., S1(C1), S2 (C1). etc.)

Section 6. I would re-label this section... something like "Verbal inflection, verb agreement, and frame of reference" since it points out a potentially very interesting difference among SLs—i.e., the geocentric frame of reference that is used in the YMSL sign language communities, and more broadly in the surrounding hearing communities.

Section 8.3. It would be helpful to readers to refer back to the figures associated with each of the summary statements made. Wherever possible, please do this.

Typos, grammatical points, and points of clarification

line 116: is > are . Among these languages is [should be "are"]Al-Sayyid Bedouin SL (Meir et al. 116 2007) and Kata Kolok (Marsaja 2008; de Vos 2012).

line 188: whom > who. Adding to this proposed evolution, De Vos (2012, 129), whom [should be "who"] is 188 working on Kata Kolok

line 270: presents, non-presents > present, non-present

line 331: was > were. Data for this paper was [should be "were", data is plural] collected in three communities...

line 472: It is customary to provide a reference for ELAN.

line 510: pressure signers in explainin > encourage signers to explain

line 545: precise > make precise

line 554: elude [meaning escape, avoid] > elide [meaning delete]

line 6 26. It is customary for instance > For instance, it is customary

line 667: boys > buoys

line 886. Nohkop 4 > Nohkop 6? You say elsewhere that Nohkop has 6 signers.

line 902: sometime > sometimes

line 922, Figure 21 caption: 3communities > 3 [space] communities

Figure 22: I think this is redundant with Table 5 and can be deleted.

line 955: pronouns > pronouns (delete s)

line 978: refences > references

Author Response

Reviewer 1 responses

I again, want to sincerely thank you for your careful reading and relevant suggestions!! Your input definitely helped me to improve on the ms. and I also hope it is now ready for publication.

Substantive points

Thank you for this comment. I wanted to provide redundant views of the same information for the sake of clarity but it seems that it only adds more confusion in the end.

Thank you for the clarification. The papers I am citing are more regarding the evolution of the language and its documentation rather than theoretical (especially Coppola 2020). Nonetheless, I try to separate both lines of thinking in the citation and not mixed them as you suggested.

Thank you for your commentary. Actually, I realized (with horror!) that Table 2 was incomplete. Sorry for this overlook. I added the relevant information and clarified in the text that CODAs are also BB (in YMSL, Yucatec Maya and Spanish). Both tables now mention BB.

I took out figure 16 that was redundant with Table 4, also Fig. 10.

In the case of table 5 and figure 22, I chose to present only fig.22 but we lose the items results. I am not sure if they are useful. I know people in psychology like to have them. I think results are at this point more or less clear in terms of quantities and/or I can add an annex if necessary. Please, I would like to hear your advice on this as well as the editor’s.

You need to spell out what you mean by "BB" and perhaps re-visit your table of participants to include this category.

I clarified in the text that all signers from1st gen are deaf.

I added a label in the fig. 11 and it is explained in the legend below too. I could not add to it to fig 12 and 13 but I think it’s clear enough.

Thank you for this suggestion. I actually change the title of the previous section (5) inserting FoR as it is relevant here and presents the issue for the next setion too.

Section 8.3. It would be helpful to readers to refer back to the figures associated with each of the summary statements made. Wherever possible, please do this.

I added references to the relevant sections and figures.

Typos, grammatical points, and points of clarification

line 116: is > are . Among these languages is [should be "are"]Al-Sayyid Bedouin SL (Meir et al. 116 2007) and Kata Kolok (Marsaja 2008; de Vos 2012).

line 188: whom > who. Adding to this proposed evolution, De Vos (2012, 129), whom [should be "who"] is 188 working on Kata Kolok

line 270: presents, non-presents > present, non-present

line 331: was > were. Data for this paper was [should be "were", data is plural] collected in three communities...

line 472: It is customary to provide a reference for ELAN. ADDED!

line 510: pressure signers in explainin > encourage signers to explain

line 545: precise > make precise

line 554: elude [meaning escape, avoid] > elide [meaning delete]

line 6 26. It is customary for instance > For instance, it is customary

line 667: boys > buoys

line 886. Nohkop 4 > Nohkop 6? You say elsewhere that Nohkop has 6 signers.

line 902: sometime > sometimes

line 922, Figure 21 caption: 3communities > 3 [space] communities

Figure 22: I think this is redundant with Table 5 and can be deleted.

line 955: pronouns > pronouns (delete s)

line 978: refences > references

Reviewer 3 Report

Summary

The (revised) paper makes two claims. First, the hypothesis for intergenerational evolution that frames the paper is the result of the “natural evolution” of sign languages. And second, the evidence presented in the paper suggests that verb agreement can appear more rapidly than previously claimed in the language emergence literature. Previous issues raised by me mainly concerned a clearer, more conceptual clarity, and relatedly, staking out a clear position, which differs from others (or not), and what the stakes of those differences or lack thereof are, i.e. why does this study matter for the field?

Continued problems

The first claim made in this version of the paper is circular. The second claim comes after a very convoluted, lengthy journey through many other ideas and claims, without clear consequences for the argument. At one moment we are asked to consider the possibility that a system for verb agreement is not necessary in certain places and times since “context of conversation and cultural habits” do that work for YMSL signers. Is that right? This is an interesting (if difficult to substantiate claim, given the kind of data you have here). However, this is directly in conflict with the idea of “stages” that you lay out elsewhere. Later, your observations suggest a preference for a geocentric frame of reference. Is this what you mean by context of conversation? If so, say that in the abstract, and then at the very beginning of the paper, and throughout, as you stake a claim to a position in the field. This paper has a ton of great work in it, and I think it will make a real contribution, but the argument really needs another layer of editing, where you really consider the layout of the paper. Help the reader predict where you are going, tell them why you are explaining what you are explaining, and tether everything to one coherent argument, which you return to again and again in the paper. Without this, you will lose your reader and the paper will not make the impact it could make. Avoid literature reviews that are not tied directly to an argument you are making.

The best part of the paper with respect to this issue is the part that compares three analyses. However, some additional work is needed:

On lines 93-94 the author reviews the R-Locus analysis of spatial agreement in signed languages. They say that the relationship between the locus in signing space and its referent is assumed in this analysis to be arbitrary. However, they say, “this link is not obvious or even communicatively permitted in certain culture.”. If this foreshadows your later argument, you should say exactly what that argument its. Do you mean by “certain culture” that in the community where you work, space (with respect to R-loci) is never arbitrary? Why not? “Culture” is not really explanatory on its own. What is it about this place or these people that you think makes arbitrary signing space unnecessary or not present? Is this temporally bound? A particular culture? Or a particular “stage” in the emergence of verb agreement? Or a particular historical stage for the people you are working with? Or something else?

With respect to the indicating analysis, the author states (lines 101-103) that the limitation lies in the fact that “it does not consider a morphemic analysis of pronouns either regarding person or number.” However, Liddell’s claim is that one does not need person or number to be marked grammatically if one can just point to referents in real or imagined spatial scenes. So he accounts for person reference without an appeal to morphology. The author should not state a general drawback to this approach, but instead why this does not suffice for this specific case. Go the relevant portion of your own analysis, later in the paper, and summarize it here in order to motivate this critique.

With respect to the featural analysis, the author states that they will be taking this approach as well. However, they do not explain why, apart from saying that they will “take into account the specificity of the data collected in YMSL”. Even if it is stated later, far more specificity is needed here. What do you get if you use this framework, as compared to the others? All of these statements on the three main approaches should be synthesized so that we can see why you are not using the other two and you are using this one.

Layout and Organization

The literature review is too long and meandering in pages 5-7. The section before this where three analyses are compared is much tighter and to the point. At the end of the literature review, which seems to be explaining theories of how the emergence of verb agreement works in emerging languages, the author says, “But the question that arises then is: how do emerging sing languages make verb agreement?”. This actually was the question that these authors were all interested in answering. It would make more sense to ask this question after the review of the three analyses, and then summarize in a very succinct way the competing ways of thinking about this in the language emergence literature. One approach argues that [a few sentences here]. Another approach highlights instead [a few sentences here]. Based on evidence collected in my fieldsite, [some modification, synthesis, or alignment here]. You should also include a preview of what aspect of that evidence speaks to this. Is it the “cultural” factors you illude to in the beginning.

The paragraph that starts “This paper is structured as follows” should come far sooner than p. 12. (see line 312).

At every turn, you should tell us why or how what you are telling us advances your argument that [and rephrase and repeat the argument]. It would help if you started with Section 2- The Yucatec Maya Sign Language, then back up to explain the three prior analyses, with recommended clarifications outlined above. Consider cutting much of the literature review, apart from concise statements about why and how your analysis departs from or contributes to those analyses.

Typographical and related issues (not exhaustive-requires significant copy-editing):

Throughout, “references” should be changed. There are referential expressions, deictics, pronouns, etc. and then there are referents. A few examples: line 11- “anaphoric references” should be changed to anaphoric reference (because it is a general category). Line 33- references >> reference.
Line 15- “maybe” >> may be
Line 64- rather than saying “but do not function as the other categories”, say what functions they do not have. Or leave that part out.
Line 67- “path of movement” >> path movement
Line 73- “other” >> others
Line 77- “focused” >> focus
Line 82- “debates” >> debate
Line 90- “coopt” >> “co-opt”
Line 94- “culture” >> cultures
Line 98- remove the “to” at the end of that line.
Line 136- “urge for grammatical structures”? Not sure what you mean.
Line 290- “an anaphoric reference” >> anaphoric reference.
Line 731- “individuals” >> individual (and no comma after).
Line 1026- “try” >> tries

Author Response

Response to R3 (round 2)

I again, want to sincerely thank you for your careful reading and relevant suggestions!! I add a hard time at first answering your critics, but I try to put some efforts into making my argument clearer and bit stronger. I added throughout the ms more clarification of my argument and I have added in the abstract and especially in the conclusion a more explicit set of argumentats as for why we notice the change of pattern in the use of space among the second generation of signers. I hope this new version will be more satisfactory and answer your comments.

Continued problems

I think there is a misunderstanding. I do not make such a claim. In section 8.2 called “How is space used for overt pronouns in YMSL?” I specifically talk about the use of overt pronouns in conversation, that is only that in some cultures and languages, within stretches of conversation, there is no need to mention overt pronouns (like in Japanese for instance) which could seem confusing for speakers of French or English for instance, as without context a sentence like 行きます could mean “I/you/he/she go(es)”. However, I am only making a claim for local stretches of conversation in certain languages and not “verb agreement is not necessary in certain places and times”.

This is an interesting (if difficult to substantiate claim, given the kind of data you have here). However, this is directly in conflict with the idea of “stages” that you lay out elsewhere. Later, your observations suggest a preference for a geocentric frame of reference. Is this what you mean by context of conversation? If so, say that in the abstract, and then at the very beginning of the paper, and throughout, as you stake a claim to a position in the field. This paper has a ton of great work in it, and I think it will make a real contribution, but the argument really needs another layer of editing, where you really consider the layout of the paper. Help the reader predict where you are going, tell them why you are explaining what you are explaining, and tether everything to one coherent argument, which you return to again and again in the paper. Without this, you will lose your reader and the paper will not make the impact it could make. Avoid literature reviews that are not tied directly to an argument you are making.

The best part of the paper with respect to this issue is the part that compares three analyses. However, some additional work is needed:

This has been clarified. I added two sentences. To explain that it will be a challenge for YMSL signers. This point is explained in various papers, closely related namely the ones I mentioned in the paper but I cannot take the time to present in detail in this one.

Haviland, John B. 1993. “Anchoring, Iconicity, and Orientation in Guugu Yimithirr Pointing Gestures”. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 3 (1): 3–45.

———. 2003. “How to Point in Zinacantán”. En Pointing: where language, culture, and cognition meet, editado por Sotaro Kita, 139–69. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Le Guen, Olivier. 2011. “Modes of pointing to existing spaces and the use of frames of reference”. Gesture 11 (3): 271–307.

McNeill, David, Justine Cassell, y Elena T. Levy. 1993. “Abstract deixis”. Semiotica 95 (1–2): 5–20.

Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1984. “On some gestures’ relation to speech”. En Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis, editado por J. Atkinson y John Heritage, Cambridge University Press, 266–96. Cambridge.

With respect to the featural analysis, the author states that they will be taking this approach as well. However, they do not explain why, apart from saying that they will “take into account the specificity of the data collected in YMSL”. Even if it is stated later, far more specificity is needed here. What do you get if you use this framework, as compared to the others? All of these statements on the three main approaches should be synthesized so that we can see why you are not using the other two and you are using this one.

Thank you for this comment. I added a sentence to clarify my choice. Basically, although Liddell’s proposal is appealing, especially for the comparison with co-speech gestures, it does not consider pointing within a morpho-syntactic framework. In the case of verbal agreement, this is problematic as some verb will have a copula or are even inflected for person (verbs of movement for instance and reciprocal).

Layout and Organization

One approach argues that [a few sentences here]. Another approach highlights instead [a few sentences here]. Based on evidence collected in my fieldsite, [some modification, synthesis, or alignment here]. You should also include a preview of what aspect of that evidence speaks to this. Is it the “cultural” factors you illude to in the beginning.

I reformulated the last paragraph of section 1.1 following your suggestion.

The paragraph that starts “This paper is structured as follows” should come far sooner than p. 12. (see line 312).

You are correct, I moved it just before section 1.1

I actually reorder the first section, cutting a bit of text but mostly organizing the section better so we star word word order, body as subject and then goes on intergenerational changes in NSL.

Typographical and related issues (not exhaustive-requires significant copy-editing):

Throughout, “references” should be changed. There are referential expressions, deictics, pronouns, etc. and then there are referents. A few examples: line 11- “anaphoric references” should be changed to anaphoric reference (because it is a general category). Line 33- references >> reference.
Line 15- “maybe” >> may be
Line 64- rather than saying “but do not function as the other categories”, say what functions they do not have. Or leave that part out.
Line 67- “path of movement” >> path movement
Line 73- “other” >> others
Line 77- “focused” >> focus
Line 82- “debates” >> debate
Line 90- “coopt” >> “co-opt”
Line 94- “culture” >> cultures
Line 98- remove the “to” at the end of that line.
Line 136- “urge for grammatical structures”? Not sure what you mean.

That’s Kegl formulation. I take to mean that the brain needs to have some grammatical structure to develop language.

Line 290- “an anaphoric reference” >> anaphoric reference.
Line 731- “individuals” >> individual (and no comma after).

What I mean is that the comparison is done between (1) individuals (i.e. between themselves), (2) generations and (3) communities

Line 1026- “try” >> tries

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Early Emergence of Agreement in Yucatec Maya Sign Language

Gaze is not relevant here. There are examples of double agreement verbs with no gaze. Gaze and phonology are very complicated issue in YMSL…

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