pam (personal agreement marker)

In DGS, case and agreement relations in constructions with plain verbs can be overtly marked through the use of a free morpheme, that is, through a personal agreement marker (henceforth pam) (see example (36) from Happ & Vorkoper 2006: 320, our transl.). pam has been attributed the status of an auxiliary verb that marks subject/object agreement in DGS (cf. Pfau & Steinbach 2006; Rath- mann 2001 for detailed discussions), whereby the object pam agrees with must be animate. Notice that pam can also be used in constructions with predicative adjectives (cf. (37) from Happ & Vorkoper 2006: 136, our transl.).

Spatial verbs

The second type of verbs, so-called spatial verbs, encodes information about locations. Spatial verbs agree with locative (oblique) arguments (Hanel 2005: 55, Happ & Vorkoper 2006: 138, Lillo-Martin 2002: 246). These verbs establish spatial loci (cf. example (38)). They can be sub-divided further into verbs of location (cf. examples in (39)) and verbs of motion (or directional verbs) (cf. examples in (40), all examples from Happ & Vorkoper 2006: 138, our transl.). A characteristic component of spatial verbs is the classifier morpheme, as is explained in the next section dedicated to classifier agreement.