This chapter explores whether and to what extent the semantic (non-)reversibility of the agent and patient referents and verbal morphology would have an effect on the constituent orders in a simple transitive event in elicited data in Sri Lankan Sign Language, Jakarta Sign Language and Hong Kong Sign Language.The agent and patient referents in a transitive event are regarded as semantically reversible if the swapping of their semantic roles results in a sentence that still makes sense, e.g.'A boy is kissing a girl' becoming 'A girl is kissing a boy'.In some previous studies of sign languages, it has been argued that if a transitive clause involves semantically reversible agent and patient referents, signers are more likely to opt for SVO, unless morphological factors such as classifiers, spatial and agreement affixations call for a verb-final construction instead.With picture elicited data by fluent signers from the three Asian Sign Languages, this chapter will argue that semantic reversibility does not necessarily result in a specific word order only; rather, it can have a range of effect on the expression strategies adopted by signers, which in turn may affect the surface constituent order.In addition, individual differences may exist across signers within a sign language as to how potential ambiguity associated with referents in reversible contexts is resolved.Specifically, data from Jakarta Sign Language and Sri Lankan Sign Language provide evidence that semantic reversibility of the referents motivates a higher frequency of spatial anchoring of the agent referents and gives rise to a variety of expression strategies, one being an adherence to SVO.In Hong Kong Sign Language, however, semantic reversibility of referents does not appear to have much effect on surface constituent order in elicited data, as signers prefer to use multi-clausal utterances and localize referents in the signing space in both reversible and non-reversible contexts.In all three sign languages, verbs that incorporate classifier handshapes of the direct objects have a strong tendency to appear sentence-finally.However, verbs that are inflected with locative and agreement affixes without classifier incorporation do not always lead to verb-final constructions, contrary to what has been suggested in the literature.
Felix Sze (Tue,) studied this question.