Sign Languages

Structures and Contexts

Joseph Hill, Diane Lillo-Martin, Sandra Wood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429665141
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Sign Language
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Sign Languages: Structures and Contexts provides a succinct summary of major findings in the linguistic study of natural sign languages. Focusing on American Sign Language (ASL), this book:

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• offers a comprehensive introduction to the basic grammatical components of phonology, morphology, and syntax with examples and illustrations;

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• demonstrates how sign languages are acquired by Deaf children with varying degrees of input during early development, including no input where children create a language of their own;

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• discusses the contexts of sign languages, including how different varieties are formed and used, attitudes towards sign languages, and how language planning affects language use;

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• is accompanied by e-resources, which host links to video clips.

Offering an engaging and accessible introduction to sign languages, this book is essential reading for students studying this topic for the first time with little or no background in linguistics.

Chapter 1

Introduction

1.1 Sign languages and their users

Sign languages are produced by the hands, face, and body and perceived primarily visually, in contrast to spoken languages, which are produced by the mouth and vocal tract and perceived primarily auditorily (although manual gestures and visual perception of gestures and mouth movements are also important for spoken languages). Natural sign languages emerge (are not invented) when Deaf people form a community, often through educational systems. Sign languages are, therefore, primarily the languages of Deaf people, who cherish them for their cultural and community-building value.

It is important to recognize the connection between sign languages and Deaf communities. Until relatively recently, Deaf communities have been told (explicitly and implicitly) that their “sign communication” was inferior, broken, unimportant, or insufficient. Educational systems and the broader hearing majority community would stress the value of learning the spoken language, even at the expense of the sign language. In fact, such attitudes persist, both in areas where the national sign language has not been deeply studied linguistically and in areas where it has been studied but the focus for economic advancement is on the spoken language. However, the natural sign languages of Deaf communities are completely linguistic, rule-governed, capable of expressing anything, and fully worthwhile. We unreservedly endorse such affirmations of the value of sign languages and promote their use in all aspects of the lives of Deaf people.

Who belongs to the Deaf community? The “d” is capitalized to reinforce the view that Deaf communities form cultural groups with practices and values that are in some cases distinct from those of non-Deaf communities. These cultural effects are passed down within the community, from parents to children in some cases, but more often through interactions of Deaf people from different families. The leaders of Deaf communities are usually Deaf adults who were raised with Deaf parents or within the community from a very early age. Generally, members of the Deaf community are audiologically deaf or hard-of-hearing (and they shun the label “hearing impaired”). The hearing children born to Deaf parents are often known as Codas (from the name of an organization, CODA, ‘children of Deaf adults’), and they are sometimes part of the Deaf community.

It is important to note that people have many identities with intersectional effects, and in this respect, not all Deaf people have the same experiences, values, and life view. A Deaf person’s identity as Deaf will be affected by their identity in other ways, including race, ethnicity, gender identity, etc. Almost all research on the American Deaf community has focused only on a subset of Deaf people, so it is important to bear in mind that others might share some but not all of the characteristics described here.

Sign languages are, then, Deaf languages. Just as with the languages of other minority groups who have experienced oppression, hearing researchers who benefit from the study of sign languages (both in personal satisfaction and in economic, career, and other means) must acknowledge the primacy of Deaf signers and treat their language with the utmost respect.

1.2 Sign languages and American Sign Language

Sign languages can be studied and described as a group – sign languages in comparison to spoken languages (while some people prefer the term “signed” languages as a parallel to “spoken” languages, we use the term “sign languages”). It should be kept clearly in mind, however, that different sign languages are indeed different languages, contrary to those who might think that “sign language” is a single, uniform system used among Deaf communities all around the world. Therefore, any particular sign or phenomenon discussed here should be understood as part of a particular sign language. With this in mind, our focus in this book is on American Sign Language (ASL), the sign language used in the United States and most of Canada. Almost all the examples we discuss will come from ASL; in fact, they will generally come from a mainstream variety of ASL that is commonly used among relatively educated Deaf people, such as those who have attended Gallaudet University. We will discuss other varieties of ASL from time to time and focus on variation in Chapter 8.

Although our focus is on ASL, which is a distinct language from other sign languages, many of the grammatical phenomena we discuss have close analogues in other sign languages. There are several possible reasons for this. The first is historical relationships among sign languages. ASL emerged in the United States following the establishment of its first school for Deaf children, the American School for the Deaf (ASD), in Hartford, Connecticut in 1817. This school was the impetus for a community of Deaf people to gather together; when such a community is formed, a sign language emerges (see Chapter 8 for more information about the emergence and history of ASL). Prior to the establishment of the school, Deaf people may have used some “homesigns” (see Chapter 7), and some of them used Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language, a “village sign language” that emerged among both Deaf and hearing people due to a high rate of deafness on Martha’s Vineyard, a small island off the coast of Massachusetts. In addition to these signs used by some of the founding members of the Deaf community at ASD, there was a strong influence from French Sign Language (LSF), because the school was founded by an American, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, who brought a Deaf graduate from a Paris school for the Deaf, Laurent Clerc, who used LSF with the students. Thereby, ASL emerged as a language with LSF as one of its source languages, along with the signing used in various places of the United States. Because a number of schools in other countries were also founded around the same time by graduates from the school in Paris, there are many sign languages used in Europe and other places that have a historical connection to ASL.

When sign languages display common structural features, at times these may be due to a common historical connection to LSF. However, there are some commonalities across sign languages that do not share this historical connection. This shows us that there may be linguistic characteristics associated with the manual/visual modality. The common ways that sign languages generally use space grammatically, in pronouns, verb agreement, and classifiers (see Chapter 3), may be among such characteristics. In addition, sign languages are able to take advantage of visual iconicity, to a greater degree than spoken languages are able to use iconicity in the auditory domain. This does not mean that sign languages are fully iconic, by any means, but there are some patterned similarities between visual referents and the ways that they are signed, which lead to certain similarities between different sign languages.

Given the observations that sign languages around the world are distinct, one might think that each sign language is a signed version of the spoken language used in its context – English for ASL, French for LSF, etc. This too is a misconception. Natural sign languages emerge in the contexts described as independent languages and have a grammar that is distinct from that of any nearby spoken languages. This is not to say that there is no relationship between a sign language and a surrounding spoken language; on the contrary, most sign language users are bilingual, at least to some extent, and as is typical in bilingual communities, each language can have some influence on the other. Nevertheless, the grammars are generally quite different, and there should be no expectation that the sign language works the way the spoken language does.

Here we are discussing the natural sign languages of Deaf communities. In an effort to educate Deaf children in the dominant spoken language, some people have invented sign systems to represent spoken languages manually. These systems, known in the United States as various forms of Signed English or Manually Coded English (MCE), are artificial and do not follow the same structural generalizations as ASL does. However, continuing exposure to MCE can also be a source of language influence, so that at least for some signers, certain properties of English may have been incorporated into their signing, just as a language may “borrow” words from another language. In general, we will aim to describe ASL as it is used by Deaf signers; when there are properties that are shared between ASL and English, whether by accident or by borrowing, they will be discussed if they are sufficiently integrated in the ASL used by native signers. It is not our aim to discuss forms of Signed English, except in cases of explicit contrast with ASL.

1.3 Key linguistic concepts

We have already used the term “grammar” several times. What do we mean when we use this term? Within linguistics, “grammar” refers to the unconscious mental rules that govern linguistic behavior. These rules are unconscious, but linguists have taken on the task of trying to figure them out, based on the kinds of linguistic behaviors that speakers produce. This task can be compared to the task of figuring out how a skilled rider controls and manipulates a bicycle by observing the rider – both as they successfully maneuver hairpin turns and as some quirk causes them to lose control. Although a cyclist may well have experienced explicit instruction, most of what they do is by instinct, as they figure out the ways that leaning one way or putting pressure another will keep them going. The researcher watches this and attempts to determine the physical and biological forces that combine to enable this feat. While the analogy is not exact, linguists do observe various kinds of linguistic behavior (including ungrammaticalities) and attempt to deduce the hidden rules that underlie the behavior.

It should be clear that these rules are “descriptive” – the researcher is attempting to discover what patterns are present in the behaviors observed. This is very different from the “prescriptive” rules that “grammar teachers” or “grammar guides” espouse; prescriptive rules are rules that are intended to inform a speaker how to speak or write “properly.” In our bicycle example, these are the rules such as “signal well in advance of a turn” or “stay in the bike lane.” While there are some contexts in which such prescriptive rules may be useful, they are not the stuff of linguistics and they are not our focus here. Descriptive rules are generally not known explicitly, though linguists and speakers may develop metalinguistic awareness of them, by thinking and talking about language as the object of study.

In addition to focusing on descriptive rules, linguists attempt to describe a speaker’s competence, which is the knowledge of the rules, rather than the actual performance at any particular time. Analyses are based on performance data, but linguists are also interested in abstract knowledge that assumes complete memory and processing capacity, just like physicists may study gravity in an environment free of friction. We do not, however, ignore context, and find that it is helpful to understand all the factors that affect performance in addition to the grammatical principles.

The rules of a mental grammar can be divided into several different domains. In this book, we will focus on the following three: phonology, morphology, and syntax. The rules of phonology are those rules that govern the pieces of words, or “sublexical units” (sub = beneath; lexical = word). For spoken languages, these are individual sounds that can be combined to make words. As is the custom in linguistics, when we talk about the sounds used we will write them within slash brackets, like /b/, /d/, and /g/. For sign languages, the sublexical units are not sounds, but there are pieces that combine to make a sign, including a handshape, a location, and a movement. We will discuss aspects of the phonology of ASL in Chapter 2. Note that a distinction can be made between phonology, the patterning of the pieces of words, and phonetics, a more precise characterization of the forms, how they are produced and perceived. While there is some interesting work on sign language phonetics, we will not discuss that domain in this book.

Morphology is the study of “morphemes,” the minimal units of meaning. Some words, like “minimum,” “unit,” and “mean,” have one morpheme; others, like “meaning,” “units,” and “minimize,” have more than one. In addition to identifying the units, morphology studies how they are organized, such as how they combine to make new words, and how they are used within sentences. We will discuss ASL morphology in Chapter 3.

Syntax is the study of sentence structure. When different words combine to produce a sentence, the way they are organized is due to the relationship between syntax and meaning. One kind of organization will fit one kind of meaning, while a different organization will be interpreted in a different way. One kind of example to illustrate this crucial role of organization is structural ambiguity. Consider the sentence, “The woman messaged the man with a cell phone.” The phrase “with a cell phone” can be interpreted as explaining how the message was sent by the woman; that is, it can modify the verb “messaged.” Alternatively, it can modify the object “the man” if it is interpreted as his cell phone, or one that he is holding; the message could have been sent via a messenger rather than a text. Syntax helps to explain why sentences can have different interpretations by appealing to the idea of an abstract structure connecting the words. Similarly, different kinds of sentences can be used for different purposes, such as making a statement, denying something, or asking a question. The abstract structure of these different sentence types as used in ASL will be discussed in Chapter 4.

There are other aspects of grammar that will not be discussed much in this text, especially semantics, the study of mean...