Sign Language
SIGN LANGUAGE
Compiled by:
1.
Risca Nur
Kafidah (13020230058)
2.
Munawaroh (13020230023)
PREFACE
Alhamdulillah,
we thank to Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta’ala who always gives us his blessing and ease
in processing this paper. So, we are able to finish it, as the duty of
linguistic subject, in time.
We also thank to all of the
participants who have arranged the materials in this paper. And we don’t forget
to say thank you very much to Miss Ayu Fatmawati, M.Pd who has supported us.
However, we
realize that there are still many shortcomings in this paper. Therefore, we
enthusiastically welcome the objective criticism and constructive suggestion
for the improvement of this paper. Finally, we do hope that this paper will be
useful for readers.
Kediri
Table of Content
Preface
Table of
Content
Chapter I: Intro
to Sign Language
Chapter II:
American
Sign Language
Chapter
III: The
Acquisition of Sign Language
Chapter IV:
The
Linguistic Structure of Sign Language
Reference
CHAPTER I
Intro to Sign
Language
Only the profoundly brain damaged, psychotic, or
abused fail to acquire or maintain language abilities. Humans acquire language
even in the presence of deafness, muteness, blindness, and many forms of brain
damage, depressed emotional states, and serious psychological conditions. This
paper deals with the linguistic abilities of deaf people.
Many people consider that deaf
people are mute and unintelligent. They also believe that without speech a
person cannot form complex ideas and cannot efficiently communicate with
others. However, this belief is the false notion. Human facility for language
is not dependent on either speech or hearing.
We know that speech is one delivery
system for language. But the auditory-vocal method of delivery is not the only
channel on which linguistic information can be carried and received. Language
can also be conveyed through the manual-visual channel by the use of sign
language.
A sign
language (also signed language or simply signing) is a
language which uses manual communication and body language to convey
meaning, as opposed to acoustically conveyed sound patterns. This can involve
simultaneously combining handshapes, orientation and movement of the hands,
arms or body, and facial expressions to fluidly express a speaker's
thoughts. They share many similarities with spoken languages (sometimes called
"oral languages", which depend primarily on sound), which is why
linguists consider both to be natural languages, but there are also some
significant differences between signed and spoken languages.
Wherever
communities of deaf people
exist, sign languages develop. Signing is also done by persons who can hear,
but cannot physically speak.
Sign languages
show the same linguistic properties and use the same language faculty as do
spoken languages.
Although some people have contended that signing is a
universal language, it is not. Those who argue that it is universal assert that
sign language is easy for any one to understand because it is iconic. An iconic
sign is picturelike, it is a mimetic representation of some phenomenon. But
iconic signs are arbitrary because they belong to particular culture. For
example, a sign that vaguely looks like a tree may look like a tree only to the
people of a specific signing community. Other signing communities may use a
different sign to indicate tree. So,
a sign can still be arbitrary even if it is iconic.
Sign
languages can be more iconic than speech because signers use three-dimensional
space. A signer can draw a picture in the air that might come close to
illustrating what the sign represents. Then there are many sign languages used
by deaf people. Some of them are Australian Sign Language, British Sign
Language, Danish Sign Language, Chinese Sign Language, Taiwan Sign Language,
Israeli Sign Language, and Thai Sign Language. One of the most researched of
any signed language has been American Sign Language (ASL).
CHAPTER II
American
Sign Language
What is American Sign Language?
American
Sign Language (ASL) is a complete, complex language that employs signs made by
moving the hands combined with facial expressions and postures of the body. It
is the primary language of many North Americans who are deaf and is one of
several communication options used by people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing.
Where did ASL originate?
The
exact beginnings of ASL are not clear, but some suggest that it arose more than
200 years ago from the intermixing of local sign languages and French Sign
Language (LSF, or Langue des Signes Française). Today’s ASL includes some
elements of LSF plus the original local sign languages, which over the years
have melded and changed into a rich, complex, and mature language. Modern ASL
and modern LSF are distinct languages and, while they still contain some
similar signs, can no longer be understood by each other’s users.
How does ASL compare with spoken language?
In spoken language, words are produced by using the mouth
and voice to make sounds. But for people who are deaf (particularly those who
are profoundly deaf), the sounds of speech are often not heard, and only a
fraction of speech sounds can be seen on the lips. Sign languages are based on
the idea that vision is the most useful tool a deaf person has to communicate
and receive information.
ASL
is a language completely separate and distinct from English. It contains all
the fundamental features of language—it has its own rules for pronunciation,
word order, and complex grammar. While every language has ways of signaling
different functions, such as asking a question rather than making a statement,
languages differ in how this is done. For example, English speakers ask a
question by raising the pitch of their voice; ASL users ask a question by
raising their eyebrows, widening their eyes, and tilting their bodies forward.
Just
as with other languages, specific ways of expressing ideas in ASL vary as much
as ASL users do. In addition to individual differences in expression, ASL has
regional accents and dialects. Just as certain English words are spoken
differently in different parts of the country, ASL has regional variations in
the rhythm of signing, form, and pronunciation. Ethnicity and age are a few
more factors that affect ASL usage and contribute to its variety.
CHAPTER
III
The
Acquisition of
Sign Language
Nowhere is the
‘natural laboratory’ metaphor more appropriate than in the field of
sign language acquisition.
This area of inquiry offers a novel and especially revealing
vantage point from which to
address weighty questions about the human capacity for
language. Research has
shown, for example, that children acquire sign language without
instruction, just as hearing
children acquire spoken language, and according to the same
timetable (Newport and
Meier, 1985). These findings lend more credence to the view,
established by linguistic
research on the adult system, that languages in the two
modalities share a
significant amount of cognitive territory; children come equipped for
the task of acquiring
language in either modality equally.
Studies have
also shown that signing children attend to grammatical properties,
decomposing and
over-generalizing them as they advance through the system, sometimes
even at the expense of the
iconic properties inherent in that system.
Parents are often the source of a child’s early acquisition
of language, but for children who are deaf, additional people may be models for
language acquisition. A deaf child born to parents who are deaf and who already
use ASL will begin to acquire ASL as naturally as a hearing child picks up
spoken language from hearing parents. However, for a deaf child with hearing
parents who have no prior experience with ASL, language may be acquired
differently. In fact, nine out of 10 children who are born deaf are born to
parents who hear. Some hearing parents choose to introduce sign language to
their deaf children. Hearing parents who choose to learn sign language often
learn it along with their child. Surprisingly, children who are deaf can learn
to sign quite fluently from their parents, even when their parents might not be
perfectly fluent themselves.
CHAPTER
IV
The Linguistic Structure of Sign Language
Hearing people
use gesture, pantomime, and facial expression to augment spoken language.
Naturally, the ingredients of these forms of expression are available to sign
languages too. The apparent familiarity of the raw material that contributes to
the formation of sign languages has led many a native observer to the mistaken
assumption that sign languages are actually simple gesture systems. However,
instead of forming an idiosyncratic, ancillary system like the one that
accompanies speech, these basic ingredients contribute to a primary linguistic
system in the creation of a sign language, a system with many of the same
properties found in spoken languages. In fact, linguistic research has
demonstrated that there are universal organizing principles that transcend the
physical modality, subsuming spoken and signed languages alike.
THE
PHONOLOGY OF SIGN LANGUAGE
William Stokoe
(1960) demonstrated that the signs of American Sign Language (ASL) are not
gestures: they are not holistic icons. Instead, Stokoe (1960) showed that they
are comprised of a finite list of contrastive meaningless units like the
phonemes of spoken languages. These units combine in constrained ways to create
the words of the language. While some differences have turned up among
different sign languages in their phonological inventories and constraints,
there are many common properties, and the generalizations presented here hold
across sign languages, unless otherwise indicated.
Stokoe
established three major phonological categories: handshape, location, and
movement. Each specification within each of the three major categories was
treated as a phoneme in Stokoe’s work. Later researchers accepted these
categories, but proposed that the specifications within each category function
not as phonemes but as phonological features.
The ASL signs
SICK and TOUCH, illustrated in Figure 1,
have the same handshape and
the same straight movement. They are distinguished by location only: the
location for SICK is the head, while the location for TOUCH is the non-dominant
hand. Minimal pairs such as this one, created by differences in one feature
only, exist for the features of handshape and movement as well. While the
origins of these and other (but certainly not all) signs may have been holistic
gestures, they have evolved into words in which each formational element is
contrastive but meaningless in itself.
Figure 1.
ASL minimal pair
distinguished by location feature.
a. SICK and b. TOUCH
Two other
defining properties of phonological systems exist in sign languages as well:
constraints on the combination of phonological elements, and rules that
systematically alter their form. One phonological constraint on the form of a
(monomorphemic) sign concerns the set of two-handed signs. If both hands are
involved, and if both hands also move in producing the sign (unlike TOUCH
above, in which only one hand moves), then the two hands must have the same handshape,
and the same (or mirror) location and movement.
An example is
DROP, pictured in Figure 2b: both hands move, and they are identical in all
other respects as well. The second defining property, changes in the
underlying phonological form of a sign, is
exemplified by handshape
assimilation in compounds. In the lexicalized ASL compound,
MIND+DROP=FAINT, the handshape
of the first member, MIND, undergoes total
assimilation to the handshape
of the second member, DROP, as shown in Figure 2.
+ 
= 
Figure
2.
Hand configuration assimilation
in the ASL compound,
a. MIND
+
b. DROP
=
c. FAINT
Stokoe believed
that handshapes, locations, and movements co-occur simultaneously in signs, an
internal organization that differs from the sequentiality of consonants and
vowels in spoken language. Liddell (1984) took exception to that view, showing
that there is phonologically significant sequentiality in this structure.
Sandler (1989) further refined that position, arguing that the locations (L)
and movement (M) within a sign are sequentially ordered, while the hand
configuration (HC) is autosegmentally associated to these elements --
typically, one hand configuration (i.e., one handshape with its orientation) to
a sign, as shown in the representation in Figure 3.
The first
location of the sign TOUCH in Figure 1b, for example, is a short distance above
the non-dominant hand; the movement is a straight path; and the second location
is in contact with the non-dominant hand.
L
M L
Figure 3.
The canonical form of a sign
(Sandler, 1989)
Under assimilation, as in Figure 2, the HC of the
second member of the compound spreads regressively to the first member in a way
that is temporally autonomous with respect to the Ls and Ms, manifesting the
auto segmental property of stability (Goldsmith, 1979). The sequential
structure of signs is still a good deal more limited than that of words in most
spoken languages, however, usually conforming to this canonical LML form even
when the signs are morphologically complex (Sandler, 1993).
THE
MORPHOLOGY OF SIGN LANGUAGE
All established
sign languages studied to date, like the overwhelming majority of spoken
languages, have complex morphology. First, as shown above in Figure 2.,
compounding is very common. In addition, some sign languages have a limited
number of sequential affixes. For example, Israeli Sign Language (ISL) has a
derivational negative suffix, similar in meaning to English –less, that
was grammaticalized from a free word glossed NOT-EXIST. This suffix has
two allomorphs, depending on the phonological form of the base, illustrated in
Figure 4. If the base is two-handed, so is the suffix, while one-handed bases
trigger the one-handed allomorph of the suffix.
a.
IMPORTANT-NOT-EXIST
(without importance)
b. INTERESTING-NOT-EXIST
(without interest)
Figure 4.
Allomorphs of an ISL suffix.
Sign languages
typically have a good deal of complex morphology, but most of it is not
sequential like the examples in Figures 3 and 4. Instead, signs gain
morphological complexity by simultaneously incorporating morphological elements
(Fischer and Gough, 1978). The prototypical example, first described in detail
in ASL (Padden, 1988) but apparently found in all established sign languages,
is verb agreement. This inflectional system is prototypical not only because of
the simultaneity of structure involved, but also because of its use of space as
a grammatical organizing property.
The system
relies on the establishment of referential loci – points on the body or in
space that refer to referents in a discourse – which might be thought of as the
scaffolding of the system. In Figure 5, loci for first person and third person
are established.
Figure 5. Referential loci. a. First person. b. Third person.
In the class of verbs that undergoes agreement, the
agreement markers correspond to referential loci established in the discourse. Through
movement of the hand from one locus to the other, the subject is marked on the first
location of the verb, and the object on
the second. Figure 6a shows
agreement for the ASL agreeing verb, ASK, where the
subject is first person and
the object is third person. Figure 6b shows the opposite: third
person subject and first
person object. The requirement that verb agreement must refer
independently to the first
and last locations in a sign was one of the motivations for
Liddell’s (1984) claim that
signs have sequential structure.
Figure 6.
Verb agreement. a. ‘I ask
him/her.’ b. ‘s/he asks me.’
Although each verb in Figure 6 includes three
morphemes, each still conforms to the canonical LML form shown in Figure 3. The agreement
markers are encoded without sequential affixation. Sign language verb agreement is
a linguistic system, crucially entailing such grammatical concepts as co-reference, subject and object, singular and
plural. It is also
characterized by sign language-specific properties, such as the restriction
of agreement to a
particular class of verbs
(Padden, 1998), identified mainly on semantic
grounds (Meir, 2002).
Another productive inflectional morphological system
found across sign languages is temporal and other aspectual marking, in
which the duration of Ls and Ms, the shape of the movement path, or both may be
altered, and the whole form may be reduplicated, to produce a range of aspects, such as
durational, continuative, and iterative
(Klima and Bellugi 1979).
This system has templatic characteristics, lending itself to an
analysis that assumes
CV-like LM templates and nonlinear associations of the kind
McCarthy (1981) proposed for
Semitic languages (Sandler, 1989, 1990).
Figure 4
demonstrated that some limited sequential affixation exists in sign
languages. However, the most
common form of sign language words by far, whether
simple or complex, is LML
(setting aside gemination of Ls and Ms in the aspectual
system, which adds duration
but not segmental content). In fact, even lexicalized
compounds such as the one
shown in Figure 2 often reduce to this LML form. If
movement (M) corresponds to
a syllable nucleus in sign language, as Perlmutter (1992),
Brentari (1998), and others
have argued, then it appears that monosyllabicity is
ubiquitous in ASL (Coulter,
1982) and in other sign languages as well. In the midst of a
morphological system with
many familiar linguistic characteristics – e.g., compounding,
derivational morphology,
inflectional morphology, allomorphy – we see in the specific
preferred monosyllabic form
of sign language words a clear modality effect (Sandler &
Lillo-Martin, in press).
No overview of
sign language morphology would be complete without a
description of the
classifier subsystem. This subsystem is quintessentially ‘sign
language’, exploiting the
expressive potential of two hands forming shapes and moving
in space, and molding it
into a linguistic system (Supalla, 1986; Emmorey, 2003). Sign
languages use classifier
constructions to combine physical properties of referents with the
spatial relations among them
and the shape and manner of movement they execute. In
this subsystem, there is a
set of hand shapes which classify referents in terms of their size
and shape, semantic
properties, or other characteristics, in a classificatory system that is
reminiscent of verbal
classifiers found in a variety of spoken languages (Senft, 2002).
These hand
shapes are the classifiers that give the system its name. An example of a
classifier construction is
shown in Figure 7. It describes a situation in which a person is
moving ahead, pulling a
recalcitrant dog zigzagging behind.
Figure 7.
classifier construction in
ASL
What is unusual
about this subsystem is that each formational element – the hand shape,
the location, and the
movement – has meaning. That is, each has morphological status.
This makes the morphemes of
classifier constructions somewhat anomalous, since sign
language lexicons are
otherwise built of morphemes and words in which each of these
elements is meaningless and
has purely phonological status. Furthermore, constraints on
the co-occurrence of these elements in other lexical forms do
not hold on classifier constructions. In Figure 7, for example, the
constraint on interaction of the two hands
described in the section on
phonology is violated. Zwitserlood (2003) suggests that each
hand in such classifier
constructions is articulating a separate verbal constituent, and that
the two occur simultaneously
– a natural kind of structure in sign language and found
universally in them, but one
that is inconceivable in spoken language. Once again, sign
language presents a
conventionalized system with linguistic properties, some familiar
from spoken languages, and
some modality-driven.
SYNTAX OF SIGN LANGUAGE
As in other
domains of linguistic investigation, the syntax of sign languages
displays a large number of
characteristics found universally in spoken languages. A key
example is recursion – the
potential to repeatedly apply the same rule to create sentences
of ever increasing complexity
– argued to be the quintessential linguistic property setting
human language apart from
all other animal communication systems (Hauser, Chomsky,
and Fitch, 2002).
Specifically, through embedding or conjoining, recursion can result in
sentences of potentially
infinite length. These two different ways of creating complex
sentences have been
described and distinguished from one another in American Sign
Language. For example, a
process that tags a pronoun that is co-referential with the
subject of a clause onto the
end of a sentence may copy the first subject in a string only if
the string contains an
embedded clause, but not if the second clause is coordinate (Padden
1988). In example (1), the
subscripts stand for person indices marked through verb
agreement, and INDEX is a
pointing pronominal form, here a pronoun copy of the matrix
subject, MOTHER. (These
grammatical devices were illustrated in Figures 5 and 6
above.)
(1) a. MOTHER SINCE iPERSUADEj
SISTER jCOMEi iINDEX
‘My mother has been urging
my sister to come and stay here, she (mother) has.’
b. * iHITj
jINDEX TATTLE MOTHER iINDEX.
‘I hit him and he told his
mother, I did.’
The existence of
strict constraints on the relations among nonadjacent elements
and their interpretation is
a defining characteristic of syntax. A different category of
constraints of this general
type concerns movement of constituents from their base
generated position, such as
the island constraints first put forward by Ross (1967) and
later subsumed by more
general constraints. One of these is the WH island constraint,
prohibiting the movement of
an element out of a clause with an embedded WH question.
The sentence, Lynn
wonders [what Jan thinks] is okay, but the sentence *It’s Jan that
Lynn wonders [what __
thinks] is ruled out.
Lillo-Martin (1991) demonstrated that ASL
obeys the WH island
constraint with the sentences shown in example (2). Given the
relative freedom of word
order often observed in sign languages such as ASL, it is
significant that this
variability is nevertheless restricted by universal syntactic constraints.
(2) a. PRO DON’T-KNOW
[“WHAT” MOTHER LIKE].
‘I don’t know what Mom
likes.’
_______t
b. MOTHER, PRO DON’T KNOW
[“WHAT” ___ LIKE].
* ‘As for Mom, I don’t know
what likes.’
The line over
the word MOTHER in (2b) indicates a marker that is not formed with the
hands, in this case a
backward tilt of the head together with raised eyebrows, marking the
constituent as a topic (t)
in ASL. There are many such markers in sign languages, which
draw from the universal pool
of idiosyncratic facial expressions and body postures
available to all human communicators
and which become organized into a grammatical
system in sign languages.
A GRAMMAR OF THE FACE
When language is
not restricted to manipulations of the vocal tract and to auditory
perception, it is free to
recruit any parts of the body capable of rapid, variegated
articulations that can be
readily perceived and processed visually, and so it does. All
established sign languages
that have been investigated use non-manual signals – facial
expressions and head and
body postures -- grammatically. These expressions are fully
conventionalized and their
distribution is systematic.
Early research
on ASL showed that certain facial articulations, typically of the
mouth and lower face,
function as adjectival and as manner adverbials, the latter
expressing such meanings as
‘with relaxation and enjoyment’, and ‘carelessly’ (Liddell,
1980). Other sign languages
have been reported to use lower face articulations in similar
ways. The specific facial
expressions and their associated meanings vary from sign
language to sign language.
Figure 8 gives examples of facial expressions of this type in
ASL, ISL and British Sign
Language, resp.
Figure 8. a. ASL
‘with relaxation and enjoyment b. ISL ‘carefully’, and c. BSL ‘exact’
A different
class of facial articulations, particularly of the upper face and head,
predictably co-occur with
specific constructions, such as yes/no questions, WH questions,
and relative clauses in ASL
and in many other sign languages as well. Examples from
ISL shown in Figure 9a
illustrate a yes/no question (raised brows, wide eyes, head
forward), 9b a WH question
(furrowed brows, head forward), and 9c the facial expression
systematically associated in
that language with information designated as ‘shared’ for the
purpose of the discourse
(squinted eyes). While some of these facial articulations may be
common across sign languages
(especially those accompanying yes/no and WH
questions), these
expressions are not iconic. Some researchers have proposed that they
evolved from more general
affective facial expressions associated with emotions. In sign
languages, however, they are
grammaticalized, and formally distinguishable from the
affective kind that signers,
of course, also use (Reilly, McIntire, and Bellugi, 1990).
Observing that
non-manual signals of the latter category often co-occur with
specific syntactic
constructions, Liddell (1980) attributed to them an expressly syntactic
status in the grammar of
ASL, a view that other researchers have adopted and expanded
(e.g., Petronio and
Lillo-Martin 1997; Neidle, Kegl, MacLaughlin, Bahan, & Lee, 2000).
A competing view
proposes that they correspond to intonational tunes (Reilly, McIntire
and Bellugi, 1990) and
participate in a prosodic system (Nespor and Sandler, 1999).
Wilbur (2000) presents
evidence that non-manuals convey many different kinds of
information -- prosodic,
syntactic, and semantic. A detailed discussion can be found in
Sandler and Lillo-Martin (in
press).
To get the ppt, click here !
To get the ppt, click here !
References
Rowe, Bruce M.
And Levine, Diane P. 2011. A Concise
Introduction to Linguistics. New Jersey. Prentice Hall.
Sandler, Wendy. To Appear in
Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. The University of Haifa.
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