2013, ASL Loci: Variables or Features

American Sign Language famously disambiguates pronoun antecedents with the use of space. In ASL, both referential and quantificational NPs can be signed at different locations (‘loci’) in the signing space. Pronouns can later retrieve these NPs by pointing at the same locus. Many analyses of ASL pro-nouns assume that these spatial loci are the overt realization of formal variables (Lillo-Martin and Klima 1990, a.o.), based on the observations that there are arbitrarily many loci and that pronoun ambiguity can be resolved under multiple levels of embedding. In this paper, I argue that loci should not be ana-lyzed as variables, but rather as morphosyntactic features. First, I show that the variable-based analysis under-generates: it is possible for two loci-sharing pronouns to appear free in the same expression but nevertheless receive different interpretations. Second, I show that loci share certain important properties with morphosyntactic features, including their behavior under focus-sensitive operators and their ability to induce complex agreement patterns. These results directly bear on the theory of Variable-Free Se-mantics (Jacobson 1999), which posits that the logic underlying natural language does not make use of formal variables. As proof of concept, I provide a variable-free fragment of ASL loci.