These two types of agreement are referred to as grammatical and anaphoric agreement. This analysis captures the fact that either grammatical or anaphoric agreement can occur without significantly changing the meaning of the sentence. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America , Chicago, IL, January 6-9, 2000. Unfortunately, such studies have focused only on spoken languages. For example, markedness relationships in ASL are different from those in spoken languages.
Many spoken languages mark only inclusive, but no spoken language marks only exclusive.
In ASL, inclusive may or may not be marked, but exclusive seems always to be marked. Specifically, indexic forms can mark both inclusive and exclusive while non-indexic forms can mark only exclusive. Thus even with pronominal forms that are not indexic, the signed modality still appears flexible enough to allow very specific pronominal reference. This has major implications for Nichols framework and design. Accordingly, the fact that this morphological feature patterns so differently in spoken and signed languages highlights the importance of including signed languages in language typologies and studies of linguistic diversity.