ELSEVIER Journal of Pragmatics 22 (1994) 647-672 Foregrounding structures in American Sign Language Ronnie B. Wilbur Department of Linquistics, Purdue University, West Lafuyette, IN 47904, USA Received March 1993; revised version April 1994 Abstract Foregrounding structures serve the primary function of highlighting information by clause- external placement. Foley and Van Valin (1985) identify five such structures: Topicalization, Clefts, Pseudoclefts, Left Dislocation, and Right Dislocation. This paper will argue that there is strong evidence that ASL has the first four of these structures, but that evidence for the existence of Right Dislocation is weak. While Topicalization and Left Dislocation in ASL have already been discussed in the literature, the contribution of the present discussion is to provide pragmatic evidence primarily for Pseudoclefts and secondarily for Clefts. Of signifi- cance is the argument that the prevailing view of the ASL Pseudocleft as a ‘rhetorical question- answer’ sequence fails to account for both syntactic and pragmatic aspects of Pseudocleft behavior. The final constituent in the Pseudocleft is shown to be a focused phrase that pro- vides the value of a variable in an open proposition; it is not an afterthought nor Right Dis- location. 1. Introduction It has long been argued that, despite relatively free surface word order, ASL is typologically an SVO language and is a topic-prominent language (Fischer, 1975; Liddell, 1978; Coulter, 1979). Different word orders reflect both syntactic and prag- matic functions, and word order changes are prosodically marked (Fischer, 1990; * I would like to acknowledge the special financial support that this project has received, including a Dean’s Incentive Grant from the Purdue University School of Liberal Arts, and NIH grant ROl- DC0093501A2 from the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders. The lin- guistic content has profited tremendously from discussions with Thorstein Fretheim. Yael Ziv, Sandy Wood, Bob Hoffmeister, Cynthia Patschke, Lesa Petersen, Wynne Janis, Victor Raskin, and Steve Seeg- miller. ASL consultants included David Geeslin, Joyce and Alan Rork, George Perry, Diane Hazel Jones, Evelyn Thompson, Jackie McBroom, Jerry Thixton, Brian Brizendine, David Reynolds, Guy Vollmer, and Sandy Wood, among many others who have graciously consented to let us videotape them being subjected to minute distinctions in meaning, usage, and structure - thanks again for all your help. ‘The Fox and the Stork’ is a Sign Media, Inc. production and is signed by Patrick Graybill. 0378-2166/94/$07.00 0 1994 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved SSDI 0378-2166(94)00062-J