**1. Introduction**

Sign languages are visual languages and their grammar relies heavily on the use of space. However, several authors have pointed out that the use of space to encode verb agreemen<sup>t</sup> takes time to develop (if it develops at all) in emerging sign languages (Senghas and Coppola 2001; Senghas 2003; Padden et al. 2009; Rathmann and Mathur 2008). Previous studies have looked at how signers from various types of sign languages use space for grammatical purposes. In sign languages generally, there is no agreemen<sup>t</sup> for indirect objects. However, it is typically verbs of transfer—verbs with subjects, direct objects, and concrete or abstract indirect objects—that form the category of agreeing verbs (Meir 2002), and agreemen<sup>t</sup> marks direct objects, and sometimes, subjects as well. Tasks based on eliciting verbs of transfer have been conducted in many settings around the world. Overall results point to the existence of an evolutionary path that initially lacks the expression of verb agreemen<sup>t</sup> in space (especially for early generations of emerging sign languages) which appears only later in the life of the sign language (de Vos and Pfau 2015; Meir et al. 2010).

This paper aims to explain how signers of the Yucatec Maya Sign Language (YMSL) have managed to develop a new class of verbs that use space to express agreement, despite the very recent age of the linguistic community and its reduced size. Critical sociolinguistic factors that have been considered to make this development possible are reviewed, among them: the size of the community, the age of the sign language, exposure to the language from previous generations and the gestural habits of the surrounding culture as well as its preferred spatial frame of reference. I argue that the use of a geocentric frame of reference is what influences the emergence of certain grammatical structures and allows YMSL signers to use double verb agreemen<sup>t</sup> constructions much earlier than what has been previously described and claimed for emerging sign languages.

**Citation:** Le Guen, Olivier. 2022. Early Emergence of Agreement in Yucatec Maya Sign Language. *Languages* 7: 233. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/languages7030233

Academic Editors: Wendy Sandler, Mark Aronoff and Carol Padden

Received: 12 May 2022 Accepted: 31 August 2022 Published: 7 September 2022

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**Copyright:** © 2022 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

#### *1.1. The Grammatical Use of Space in Sign Languages*

Of special interest in sign languages is how signers realize agreement, that is, how they express on verbs which participant in the discourse is doing what to whom (e.g., roles such as subject vs. recipient). In sign languages, a specific class of verbs, called agreeing verbs, typically use movement in space to mark an action and the starting and ending points of the trajectory usually express syntactic relations among referents (agent, patient, recipient, direct or indirect object, location, etc.)

The main aim of this paper is to describe how a verb's movement in the signing space is used by YMSL signers to interpret semantic roles (i.e., subject vs. recipient). In order to do that, I follow the methodology and theoretical issues raised in previous studies on emerging sign languages, specifically Senghas (2003) on Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) and Padden et al. (2009) on Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL). Both studies show that the use of verbs inflected for agreemen<sup>t</sup> does not appear until later generations have been using the language. Crucially, in sign languages, not every verb makes use of space for grammar or expresses agreement. Padden (1983) considers three verb types: (a) *Plain verbs* that can generally be inflected for aspect but not for argumen<sup>t</sup> (for instance, in ASL verbs such as EAT, KNOW, LOVE, REMEMBER, UNDERSTAND). Usually, such verbs are performed on the body and have a semantics oriented to the subject being the experiencer. (b) *Spatial verbs* usually imply some directionality that describes a motion and an end point (for instance, in ASL, verbs such as MOVE, PUT, etc.). Crucially, these verbs do not consider the action of an agen<sup>t</sup> on a patient or an object but most commonly a movement from one point in space to another location. Finally, (c) *agreeing verbs* use directionality to make the verb agree with the arguments of the utterance. Agreeing verbs make a relevant use of space and the location of the entities that are involved in the action described. When the entities treated as arguments are present, such as the agen<sup>t</sup> and the patient, the verb will be oriented towards them. For instance, in ASL, the sentence "I TEACH YOU" starts from the body of the signer (her head in this case), and the end point is in the direction of the interlocutor. However, things become more complicated when the referents are not present. In this case, empty locations in the signing space are arbitrarily and contextually linked to these referents at the discourse level. Such points in space have been labeled R-locus (short for Referential locus, or R-loci in plural) (Lillo-Martin and Klima 1990; Lillo-Martin and Meier 2011). Consider for instance the sentence "Bill gives Maria a rose". If neither Bill nor Maria are present, the signer can assign an empty location to his/her right for Bill and another to his/her left for Maria and perform the verb GIVE between these two locations (from right to left in this case), hence making the verb agree with the arguments (Klima and Bellugi 1979). However, for such a grammatical system to work, noun phrases (in this case "Bill" and "Maria") should first be explicitly located in the signing space as pronouns and later referred to anaphorically in the discourse by moving the verb from and to these locations.

#### *1.2. Establishing Pronominal Reference in Space*

A common way that sign languages mark pronouns is through pointing. Many researchers consider that pointing to oneself refers to first person singular and pointing to the body of the addressee indicates second person (Mathur and Rathmann 2012; Meir and Sandler 2008). Third person can also be established by pointing if the referent is present. However, pointing to referents that are not present or unknown can be problematic. For known but non-present referents, in many sign languages, and especially emerging rural sign languages, one strategy is to use metonymic pointing (Le Guen 2011a), that is, to point to an intermediate referent in lieu of the primary referent: for instance, pointing to the house of Albert to refer to Albert (independently of whether he is there or not). Such a strategy is commonly used, even in some cases for directional verbs (Hou 2016). A second strategy is to use R-loci that allow signers to assign referents to arbitrary points in the signing space. Different referents are allocated to different points in space so that most

cases of ambiguity are avoided (Meir and Sandler 2008, p. 65). As we shall see below, assigning referents in space is a crucial prelude to verb agreement.

#### *1.3. Evolution of Space as a Means to Express Verb Agreement*

While looking at verb agreemen<sup>t</sup> in sign languages, a cross-linguistic comparison reveals that not all languages rely on similar strategies. For some researchers (Mathur and Rathmann 2012; Rathmann and Mathur 2008), the process of verb agreemen<sup>t</sup> in sign languages has been interpreted as a linguistic innovation that occurs through a specific use of the signing space and the authors consider that "the cross-linguistic variation across sign languages with respect to certain properties of verb agreemen<sup>t</sup> can be explained by positing that the sign languages are at different points along the path of grammaticalization" (2012, p. 146). Indeed, the body of research currently available on emerging sign languages around the world points to three stages of evolution.

In the first stage, some languages do not have a class of agreeing verbs. So, in order to resolve the issue of explaining who is giving what to whom, they rely on a consistent word order using plain verbs. This is the case for ABSL, an emerging sign language used by a Bedouin community in Israel (Meir et al. 2007; Sandler et al. 2005; Padden et al. 2009). Signers do not use the signing space to express the subject and object of a transitive verb, but rather rely on a fixed word order to disambiguate the utterance, as in WOMAN GIVE MAN TAKE (Sandler et al. 2005, p. 2664). The authors conclude that "once languages have had time to accrue such mechanisms as verb agreement, marking properties of subject or object ( ... ) the roles of participants can be made clear, even without consistent word order. In the absence of such mechanisms, word order is the only way to disambiguate a message linguistically" (Sandler et al. 2005, p. 2665). In such cases, a signer performs a plain verb in the signing space that can involve movement (such as TRANSFER) typically along the sagittal axis but that does not connect any argumen<sup>t</sup> in the signing space. Crucially, the direction of the verb's movement is not relevant grammatically. In a sense, the verb is performed in a neutral space since it is not inflected for arguments.

The second stage is what has been called single verb agreement. In this case, the signer will mark one argumen<sup>t</sup> and uses his/her body as the default second argumen<sup>t</sup> for transitive constructions. One argumen<sup>t</sup> can be located outside the body as an R-locus ascribed in the signing space, making directionality relevant. Morford and Kegl (2000) compared data from homesigners and signers who are exposed to more full-fledged forms of Nicaraguan Sign Language, and they found that homesigners have a tendency to express human action from a first person perspective (Morford and Kegl 2000, p. 376). Such findings support the idea that, in the early stages of the evolution of a language, signers seem to rely more heavily on representing actions from an agent's perspective, thus making extensive use of their own bodies. Meir et al. (2007) and Padden et al. (2010) present similar findings for two young sign languages: ABSL and Israeli Sign Language. However, despite the fact that Kata Kolok, an emerging sign language from Bali, has been used by six generations already, it does not ye<sup>t</sup> have a class of true agreeing verbs (Marsaja 2008; de Vos 2012).

The final stage is the creation of double agreemen<sup>t</sup> verb types that rely on the use of the R-loci. As explained earlier, the R-locus strategy implies that locations around the body of the signer are arbitrarily linked to non-present referents. Such a use of the gestural space is actually common among speakers of most Western educated societies (McNeill 2003; McNeill et al. 1993), and it is thus not surprising to find it used for grammatical purposes in sign languages that arose and developed in these cultures. However, the use of abstract pointing is not a given in other societies, as people in these communities tend rather to make person reference by pointing to people's houses or usual place of residence, and only point to existing places in accordance with their real-world locations (Le Guen 2011a; de Vos 2012; Blythe et al. 2016).

In sum, studies sugges<sup>t</sup> that using space symbolically and arbitrarily with R-loci comes later in the evolution of sign languages, and single agreemen<sup>t</sup> verbs that use the body as the subject seem to appear prior to the appearance of double agreemen<sup>t</sup> verbs. Several explanations have been put forward to explain this evolution and the appearance of agreeing verbs, especially in emerging sign languages. The first is the size of the community of signers; the more people use the sign language, the more complex and grammatically refined will it become. The second argumen<sup>t</sup> relates to the age of the sign language and the number of generations. In the case of emerging sign languages, evolution in the grammar is strongly linked to the number of cohorts that have been in contact, the first cohorts providing the shared symbolic environment that the subsequent generations can exploit. Linked to the previous argument, early exposure has also been considered crucial in the development of grammar, as certain periods of language exposure are essential in order to develop a more complex grammatical system. Finally, the use of space, and specifically of the frames of references, has been considered to help or to potentially restrain the emergence of certain grammatical structures. Frames of Reference (FoR) are systems of coordinates that allow to localize a referent (a figure) with respect to a ground. Three basic FoR are usually considered: (a) the intrinsic FoR in which the figure's location is represented in relation to the ground's intrinsic properties (front, back, sides). (b) The egocentric FoR in which relations between objects are calculated in relation to the speaker's (projected) point of view, that is, in relation to his left, right, front, or back. (c) the geocentric FoR (or sometimes more broadly considered within the "allocentric FoRs") in which coordinates between entities are defined by external features of the environment (i.e., neither by the internal orientation of a ground object nor the point of view of the speaker), often with the use of cardinal directions (See Levinson (2003) for a more detailed discussion and Haviland (1996, 2003), Le Guen (2011a, 2011b) for examples on how there are used with gestures in Mayan communities). The cultural or local preference for the geocentric FoR and its implication on gestures (as well as its correlated impact on pointing) has been suggested to go against an abstract use of the signing space and therefore the emergence of agreeing verbs in emerging sign languages (Le Guen 2011a; de Vos 2012).

The present study aims to determine where YMSL is placed on the evolutionary continuum: Does it behave like many other emerging sign languages, only using a sagittal axis with no agreemen<sup>t</sup> or does it use space to express verb agreement? I will show that despite YMSL's young age, YMSL signers already are able to use the signing space productively with agreeing verbs. I will discuss all the hypotheses previously considered and explain how the geocentric FoR actually favors the emergence of agreeing verbs in YMSL.

#### **2. The Yucatec Maya Sign Language**

Yucatec Maya Sign Language (YMSL) is an indigenous sign language used by deaf and hearing signers in Yucatec Mayan communities with a high incidence of deafness in the peninsula of Yucatán, Mexico. The sign language used in these communities is unrelated to Mexican Sign Language (*Lengua de Señas Mexicana*, LSM) and developed outside of institutional settings, out of the necessity for deaf and hearing community members to communicate with each other. Data for this paper were collected in three communities: Chicán, Nohkop and Trascorral. The communities of study are all located within the state of Yucatán but at one to several hours drive from each other. Members of the three communities have not been in contact in the past, their sign languages emerged within recent decades and are historically unrelated. In-depth interviews with community members, including the oldest deaf signers and their families, failed to provide any evidence for historical contact between the communities. In Nohkop and Trascorral, the oldest signers are still alive and in Chicán, the oldest signer passed away in early 2020. None of them remember the presence of any other deaf people or an already existing sign language in their environment during their childhood. Despite the lack of a historical link, the varieties of YMSL from different communities exhibit an important degree of overlap in their lexicon and can be considered a similar language, a proposition that has been argued in previous work, at least for Chicán and Nohkop (Le Guen 2012; Le Guen

et al. 2020; Safar 2017, 2019; Safar et al. 2018). This can partly be explained by the shared sociolinguistic background and the common gestural precursors (precisely, the extensive use of multimodal communication among speakers of Yucatec Maya). The villages differ from each other in their overall population size as well as the number and distribution of deaf people.

Chicán is a village of 720 inhabitants, including 16 deaf people who are between 19 and 69 years old. The oldest signer was in his early eighties when he passed away in 2020. In Nohkop, signers are all from a family of five siblings between the ages of 20 and 28 who grew up together and among whom four are deaf. Trascorral is home to a family of 13 siblings, six of whom are deaf and are between 11 and 33 years old. Demographic data of the three communities are summarized in Table 1 (adapted from Safar 2017).


**Table 1.** Overview of the communities' population.

\* Nohkop is a pseudonym for a small neighborhood of the town Chemax, chosen according to the family's wish to remain anonymous. Signers now currently live in two separate villages: Chemax and Tixhualactun.

Only in Chicán do we encounter a maximum generational depth of three generations. However, the oldest signer in Chicán, now deceased, only had hearing children and was the only deaf person of his age group. Only the subsequent generation—today between 23 and 69 years old—included a critical mass of deaf signers. Le Guen (2012, p. 216), following Kisch (2012), divides deaf signers in Chicán into seven "interactional groups", some of which include several hearing and deaf members. There are two young deaf signers (19 and 23 years old in 2021) who were born to deaf parents and grew up in a house surrounded only by deaf people.

The deaf population of Nohkop and Trascorral is comprised of siblings within one family each, who constitute the first generation of users of their sign language. Over the past few years, the signing community in Nohkop has dissolved as deaf women have gone to live with their husbands, either in the same village but in a different household or in the husband's village. As of 2022, the oldest deaf signer had two hearing children (ten and seven years old). The second deaf girl of the family had three hearing children (twelve, eight and three years old). The younges<sup>t</sup> deaf girl had a two-year-old child. All the children are acquiring YMSL as their first language and Maya and Spanish as their second languages. It should be noted that, as of now, they are not very proficient in the sign language, at least compared to the Bilingual-Bimodal cousins of their parents. Additionally, and despite the fact that their hearing parents are native Yucatec Maya speakers, the socialization process is currently conducted almost exclusively in Spanish, based on the belief that Spanish will give them better education and job opportunities. The deaf women are married to hearing men who learned the sign language through living with their respective wives and are fluent in YMSL. In Trascorral, the women stay in the village as housewives while all deaf men go to work on the coast only coming back on the weekends.

In these communities, most people know each other and many are kin-related, thus the specific dynamics of interaction of YMSL signers conform to general cultural interaction patterns. As customary among the Yucatec Maya, people interact primarily with members of their own extended families. Deaf people do not socialize with each other based only on their shared experience of being deaf and a separate Deaf community, as in the context of national/urban sign languages, does not exist (Johnson 1991; Escobedo Delgado 2012; Macdougall 2012; Safar and Le Guen 2020; Safar 2017). This results in a situation where deaf signers from different interactional groups in Chicán have sometimes little contact with each other and exhibit some differences in their signing (Safar et al. 2018; Safar and Chan 2020).

#### **3. Materials and Methods**
