On Referential Vagueness: A Comparative Study of English and American Sign Language

Yoon, Suwon. 2021. On referential vagueness: A comparative study of English and American Sign Language. Linguistic Research 38(1): 53-73. In addition to the widely known Free Choice Items (FCIs), there exists another type of anti-specific item, known as existential indeterminate or Referentially Vague Items (RVIs) such as some-X-or-other in English. Such polarity items are characterized to be rather semantically non-emphatic, and their non-emphaticness is modeled as referential vagueness as a speaker-based felicity condition of minimal, non-exhaustive variation. Both FCIs and RVIs are anti-specificity phenomena, relying on a speaker’s epistemic judgment, but distinct in that, whereas FCIs require exhaustive variation, RVIs require partial, non-exhaustive variation. However, the landscape of specificity in signed languages has been less well-defined. In this background, the main goal of current study is twofold: first, by identifying an RVI sign in ASL, equivalent to RVIs in English, I support the necessity of the notion of referential vagueness to correctly capture the meaning and distribution of non-emphatic, non-exhaustive NPIs occurring in nonveridical contexts; and second, I show how both English and ASL exhibit a remarkable case of semantic-o-pragmatic extension from anti-specificity (as RVIs) to anti-veridicality (as metalinguistic negation).