Chapter 6 Signed Languages

A few years ago, the noted linguist David Perlmutter published an essay that began with the fol- lowing story,1 told to him by one of his students: The young man told of how, when he was a child, he had a friend with whom he had many good times, although for some reason this girl never talked to him. Once, he went home with her and met her mother and had a very surprising experience. The mother came down the stairs, and it suddenly became obvious to the boy that his friend and her mother were communicating somehow, although he couldn't see how they were managing to do so. When he returned to his own home, he told his mother about it, and his mother explained, ‘They're different from us. They speak. We sign.’ And she did her best to explain to him that there is something called ‘sound’ and something called ‘hearing’, and that his friend and her mother were communicating by means of sound, rather than gesture. As the boy struggled to understand these strange concepts,2 he said, ‘Wow! Are there other people like that?’ And his mother said, ‘Yes. Most people speak. We are the ones who are different.’

For the past few weeks we've been examining the sounds that are characteristic of spoken language, as well as some of the ways spoken language can be represented in writing. But we should all admit that we have been ignoring an important segment of human linguistic activity. Not all human language is spoken. Not all human language uses sound as a medium.

Obviously, written language is not spoken and does not use sound as a medium. I can write a book which can be read and (perhaps) enjoyed by thousands of people long after i have left this world; and we are similarly able to enjoy and appreciate the linguistic output of writers from cen- turies ago. But the words i write are representations of the same sort of words that i speak. Since i am more comfortable with languages making use of alphabetic or semi-alphabetic writing systems, the words i write are in fact direct representations of spoken words, even if they are not actually spoken as i write them. But even a logographic writing system such as 漢字, with its use of ‘phonetic cues’, presupposes the existence of a spoken language that it is meant to represent. And i'm sure that even the finest calligraphers among the great poets of the Chinese nation conceived their finest verses primarily in spoken form, intending them more to be heard by the ear than read by the eye.

This is an interesting circumstance, when you think about it. We are primates, and one of the characteristics that sets primates as an order apart from other mammals is that we are very vision- oriented. Unlike most other mammals we are extremely sensitive to colour; our eyes are located in the fronts of our heads, endowing us with binocular vision and excellent depth perception. And yet, one of the things that most defines us as a species, our linguistic ability, is very much geared not toward vision but toward hearing. There are evolutionary, or at least historical, rea- sons for this seeming paradox, but a paradox it remains.

But it's not entirely true, as we must admit to ourselves. Some human languages are never spoken and have no acoustic component but are entirely visual. These are called sign languages or gestural languages and are developed by and for the use of the deaf, who cannot hear, or the mute, who cannot speak. These languages make use entirely of visual signs — gestures with the hands

1‘No Nearer the Soul’, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory (1986), 4:515–23. 2and, incidentally, began to understand why it had always seemed to him that his friend never talked to him

132 and arms, in some cases supplemented by facial expressions — to communicate all the things we ‘normal’ people communicate by modulating the air passing out of our lungs.

It's only been quite recently that linguists and other researchers have begun taking a serious look at the communication methods used by the deaf, and there are many misconceptions among normal, hearing people like us about sign languages, which are only recently being corrected. These misconceptions can be grouped into three basic errors; i'm going to spend some time explaining what is erroneous about each of them. Misconception #1: Sign language is basically mime/iconic We all of us make gestures in communicating. We wave to a friend; we flag down a taxi or a bus; we nod or shake our heads to signify ‘yes’ or ‘no’; we point to things as we talk about them. We express our feelings with facial expressions.

Some of these gestures are universal. Some aren't. Some communicative gestures are restric- ted to certain cultures. For instance, here in the Chinese cultural region the gesture in Fig. 6.1 means ‘10’ and the one in Fig. 6.2 means ‘6’. In North American culture, Fig. 6.1 does not mean ‘10’, and Fig. 6.2 means nothing at all. On the other hand, in North American culture Fig. 6.3 means ‘10’, Fig. 6.4 means ‘time's up’, and Fig. 6.5 means ‘i'm not sure what i'm saying is really true’, or something like that; i doubt whether any of these gestures has any such meaning in Chi- nese culture. So there's a certain amount of arbitrariness and conventionalization about communicative gestures. I can understand why Fig. 6.1 means ‘10’ here,3 and perhaps you can understand why Fig. 6.4 means ‘time's up’ in my culture — both gestures relate to the relevant written language. And perhaps you can understand why Fig. 6.3 means ‘10’ in my culture. But some of these conventionalized, culture-bound gestures are quite mysterious to an outsider; for instance, it would take me quite a while to explain to you why Fig. 6.5 means what it does.

Fig. 6.1 ‘十’ Fig. 6.2 ‘六’ (Chinese cultural gesture) (Chinese cultural gesture)

Fig. 6.3 ‘10’ Fig. 6.4 ‘time's up’ Fig. 6.5 ‘i'm uncertain (American (American whether this is true’ cultural gesture) cultural gesture) (American cultural gesture)

3I think the same is true for why Fig. 6.2 means ‘6’, but i'm not sure.

133 Communicative gestures that in some way represent what they're supposed to mean are said to be iconic. Holding up a certain number of fingers to represent that same number as an abstrac- tion is an iconic gesture. In this sense, the Western gesture for ‘10’ is iconic in that it actually presents a visual image of ‘10’, while the Chinese gesture for ‘10’ is not iconic since it depends upon an association with the way the Chinese word for ‘10’ is conventionally written. But even iconic gestures can be conventionalized and adapted within a certain cultural context, and as a result they can be confusing to outsiders.

For instance: In my culture, there are several gestures that communicate an invitation or a request to come closer, but they all of them involve the palm being upward. I can beckon with a single finger (as in Fig. 6.6), or with all the fingers together (as in Fig. 6.7), but in both cases my palm is upward. In some Southern-European cultures, however, the same meaning is expressed by gestures that involve the palm turned downward (as in Fig. 6.8).4

Fig. 6.6 ‘come here’ Fig. 6.7 Fig. 6.8 ‘come here’ (Northern European) (Southern European; Chinese?) ‘go away’ (Northern European)

Now, note what's happening when i perform either gesture; i'm not merely flexing my fingers once, i'm moving them back and forth, right? I move them one way, then i move them back in order to repeat the motion. Now, which movement is the meaningful one? Am i deliberately moving my fingers toward me, or away from me? How can you tell? You can't, really, unless you're already culturally conditioned to interpret the gesture one way and not the other. The result is that if i see the gesture in Fig. 6.8 i'm just as likely to interpret it as a request to move away as i am as a request to come closer; in fact, given my own cultural background, that's probably how i will interpret it, since it rather resembles a gesture that i would use to figuratively push something away from me.

In Chapter 10 i discuss the conventionalization of onomatopœia — how different language- communities have differing opinions about how to represent various natural sounds by linguistic means, so that, in a sense, roosters crow differently, dogs bark differently, cows low differently in different countries. Well, obviously, what has been said about onomatopoeia can be said equally well about ‘iconic’ gestures; they, too, are conventionalized and vary from culture to culture.

What this means for the purposes of today's subject is that even iconic gestures aren't transparent; you can't assume that merely because a gesture's meaning is obvious to you or is somehow iconic that its meaning will be equally obvious to any intelligent human being. Supposedly ‘iconic’ gestures, the ones that are supposed to most clearly represent in visual terms what they mean, are therefore to some extent as culture-bound as any other kind of sign-system, including language. Thus, to say that a sign language is iconic, or some kind of ‘mime’, does not excuse us from considering to what extent it resembles a ‘real’ language.

4I recently saw a father summoning his children from off a playground with this gesture, so i'm guessing the same convention exists here as well as in Italy.

134 In a spoken language, the percentage of words that are truly onomatopoetic is very small; the vast majority of words are completely arbitrary. In the case of sign languages — languages specifically developed for use by deaf people — we can likewise say that the percentage of gestures that are truly iconic, that really look like what they're supposed to mean (enough to suggest that meaning clearly to any intelligent person) is very small. About 20 years ago, in fact, a sign language called Gestuno was developed that strives to be as iconic, as directly representational, as possible. In this language, the gesture in Fig. 6.9 means ‘lion’. Once i'm told it's supposed to represent an animal, i can see how it could represent ‘lion’, but frankly it suggests more ‘headphones’ to me.

Fig. 6.9‘lion' — or is it ‘headphones’? Fig. 6.10 ‘父’ Fig. 6.11 ‘yellow’ (Gestuno) (Chinese Sign Language) (American Sign Language)

In Chinese Sign Language, the gesture in Fig. 6.10 means ‘father’. That's what i'm told, and i'll accept that, but i fail to see any particular reason why it should have that meaning. What does this gesture have to do with the concept of ‘fatherhood’, whether one expresses that concept by the English word ‘father’ or the Chinese word ‘父’? Likewise, in American Sign Lan- guage the gesture in Fig. 6.11 means ‘yellow’; again, i fail to see any connection between the visual image that this gesture presents and the concept ‘yellow’.

Think for a moment about what you would do if somebody asked you to come up with some sort of gesture that communicated either of the concepts ‘father’ or ‘yellow’. Obviously, ‘yellow’ is a colour, it's a visual experience. But how do you communicate the abstract concept ‘yellow’ — or any other colour — by means of gesture, short of pointing to some object that happens to be yellow? Assuming you are unable to speak, or the person with whom you're trying to communicate is unable to hear, how would that person understand you were trying to draw attention specifically to the colour of the object you're pointing to? For instance, i might try to use some sort of gesture to conjure up a mental image of the Sun, whose natural colour is yellow. Assuming i managed to do this and assuming you recognized the gesture in question as a representation of the Sun, how do you know i'm referring specifically to its colour, instead of, say, its shape or its brightness or its heat or the fact that it's a nice, sunny day? And what if there don't happen to be any yellow objects around for one to point to?

Suppose that, instead of the colour ‘yellow’, which is a fairly common colour on this planet, i wanted to communicate the concept that in English is called ‘mauve’ and in Chinese is called ‘淡紫’? This is not a common colour, and properly speaking ‘mauve’ doesn't exist in nature at all, at least not on this planet. What sort of gesture could be guaranteed to communicate a concept like that? And we're still talking about concepts, like colours, that are closely associated with visual images. What about total abstractions like ‘truth’ or ‘holiness’? Can you imagine any gestures that everybody would automatically agree convey these concepts? Although yellow objects are real and can be apprehended directly, ‘yellow’ itself is an abstract concept; and the association between this gesture and that concept is just as arbitrary and conventional as that

135 between the concept and the word ‘yellow’, or the word ‘黃’ for that matter. And, as with spoken language, most of the gestures used in ‘true’ sign language — the language of the deaf — are just as arbitrary; truly iconic signs make up a small percentage of them, just as truly onomatopoetic words make up only a small percentage of the vocabulary of any spoken language.

Grammar in Sign Language Besides simple vocabulary, there are other elements of ‘true’ sign language, the language of the deaf, that are definitely not iconic, and for which, i'm pretty sure, no truly iconic representation could be imagined.

I've said that a true human language is made up of two parts, a vocabulary or lexicon and a grammar. This is as true of sign languages as of spoken languages. We've so far been looking at some aspects of sign-language vocabulary. I'm now going to talk briefly about some aspects of sign-language grammar; i will come back to this subject later.

Like many spoken languages, American Sign Language (ASL) has derivational ‘affixes’ that serve to convert verbs into nouns. The only difference is that these ‘affixes’ in ASL take the form of gestures rather than phonological strings. In Figs. 6.12–13 i've given you pictures of a couple of examples of such ‘nominalization’ morphological processes in ASL. What's important to note in both cases is that the hand-shape is the same in the verb and the noun version; what's different is how the hand is moved. In Fig. 6.12 the difference is very subtle — only a matter of degree; in 6.13 the two gestures are quite different; only the common hand-shape indicates that the same basic idea is being expressed.

Fig. 6.12 ASL ‘compare’ Fig. 6.13 ASL ‘measure’ vs. vs. ‘comparison’ ‘act of measuring’

Another point worth noting here, however, is that the specific gestures demonstrated in Figs. 6.12–13 have no more obvious, inherent, or logical connection with the concept of ‘nominalization’ than a spoken-language affix like the English -ison. So far from being iconic, the gestures in Figs. 6.12–13 are quite as arbitrary as most of the lexical details of spoken languages.

In Section 2 we considered how the phonemes of a typical spoken human language could be distinguished on the basis of distinctive phonetic features. Well, there are similar phenomena in sign languages. In a typical sign language like ASL, gestures can distinguished according to features such as 1 Hand Configuration — the exact arrangement of the fingers, etc.; 2 Place of Articu- lation — the specific region within the general ‘signing space’ in which the gesture is performed; and 3 Movement — the exact direction in which the hand (or one hand) moves during the gesture. In Figs. 6.14–16, i offer you examples of ASL signs that are distinguished only in one or another of these ‘features’. These would be examples of ‘minimal pairs’ (or triples) in ASL.

136

Fig. 6.14 — Signs Contrasting only in Hand Configuration

Fig. 6.15 — Signs Contrasting only in Place of Articulation

Fig. 6.16 — Signs Contrasting only in Movement

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In Chapter 14 we will be considering what is known about how the brain functions linguistically as opposed to other ways, in particular which parts of the brain seem to be concerned primarily with language as opposed to other activities. Right now i'm just going to say that there is a fair amount of clinical evidence that when deaf people are communicating with each other by means of sign language their brains behave quite differently from the way they behave when they are merely gesturing, for instance to show the way to the nearest mailbox or supermarket. And the way their brains behave when they are using sign language is, as far as anyone can tell, the same as the way our brains behave when we are using spoken language.

Sign Language Acquisition Another consideration that makes clear the deep difference between sign language and ordinary gestures such as everybody might use has to do with language acquisition — how children learn their first language. We'll be talking a lot more about how children in general learn language later in the term, but right now i'm going to mention one particular fact. Somewhere around the ages of 2 or 3 years, children typically start picking up pronouns, and get confused.5 Each of you refers to hannself as ‘我’, right? And when you're talking with a friend you refer to your friend as ‘你’, right? And when you were a little child, how did your mother address you? I'll bet anything you like that she normally addressed you either by your name or as ‘你’. And i'll further bet anything you like that, at a certain point when you were about 2 or 3 years old, you thought ‘你’ was synonymous with your name, and so you used it instead of ‘我’ to refer to your- self. You probably don't remember this, your parents may not even remember this because most

5Please tolerate my slipping into Chinese examples here, so i can avoid having to make case distinctions.

137 children figure out the correct use of pronouns pretty quickly and get over this confusion, but we've all gone through this stage at some point in our early lives.6

OK, in ASL and many other sign languages the equivalents of the 1st- and 2nd-person personal pronouns are blatantly iconic. To express the concept which Chinese expresses by ‘我’, signers point to themselves; to express the concept ‘你’, they point to whomever they're speaking to. What could be simpler or more obvious? We can all understand that, can't we? And all children, hearing or deaf, of whatever age beyond very earliest infancy, understand the basic concept of pointing. So imagine a deaf child growing up in a household in which the parents are either also deaf or, if not deaf themselves, are at any rate fluent signers. And Mother points to herself to mean ‘herself’ and points to the child to refer to the child. And what happens? These kids, who like all human children understand what it means to point at something and use the pointing gesture quite appropriately when it has nothing to do with language, at that certain stage of early life that i was referring to a moment ago get it all wrong when they're signing; they point away from themselves to refer to themselves. To a cognitive scientist, this clearly indicates that when these children are signing, that is, using gesture in a linguistic manner, they're using a completely different part of their brains than when they're merely trying to point at something, and the two parts of the brain in question are so far from being the same that they aren't even communicating with each other very well yet. Sign language is not merely iconic gesturing.7

To speak a bit more generally, at the beginning of this chapter i told you a story about a deaf boy and his discovery that some people are not deaf but communicate through sound. You will probably have guessed from this story that the boy was not the only deaf person in his family, that in fact his entire family — both his parents as well as himself — were deaf, and ASL was the normal mode of communication within that household. Some instances of deafness are conge- nital, are inherited, and it's not unusual for deaf people to have deaf children, and those children are then raised in deaf families using some appropriate sign language; i think those are probably the lucky ones. But not all deafness is inherited; some children are born to ‘normal’, hearing parents but lose their hearing very early in life due to some accident. Often in such cases the parents don't know sign language or understand the importance of using it in raising their child, and so, at the age when children normally learn their first language, the child gets very little in- put from what ought, in principle, to be hanns natural language. But there is plenty of evidence that such children, denied the opportunity to learn a fully-established sign language, will do their best to invent one of their own, bringing to bear on the task all the energy that young children normally use in learning (spoken) language. And the resulting sign language will have all the grammatical richness of a legitimate language. There just won't be anyone else the child can use it with. It's to be hoped that, in such cases, the child will as early as possible be introduced to a group of deaf people who have a well-established sign language which the child can then learn, in order that hann will have a community hann can communicate with in a natural way. But my main point right now is the drive in such a child to develop a sign language, a drive that corresponds in every respect to the drive ‘normal’, hearing children have at the same age to mas- ter a spoken language. This is further evidence that ‘true’ sign languages, those used by the deaf as their principal means of communication, are fully equivalent to the spoken languages routine- ly used by us ‘normal’ people.

6As a linguist, of course, i'm more aware of what to look for, and i remember my kids going through short periods when each of them was a little confused about the pronouns ‘me’ and ‘you’. 7My source for this information is Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (New York: Morrow, 1994), pp. 152–53.

138 Sign Languages and Trade Jargons I mentioned earlier that we all use gestures to communicate. There are in addition certain specialized circumstances in which ‘normal’, hearing people use gestures a lot to communicate, much more than usual. For instance, merchants in bazaars may have a set of hand signals which they use in bargaining; and traders on the floor of the stock exchange in major financial centers often use hand signals to communicate with each other when they are too far apart to be able to hear each other speak. These can be thought of as highly specialized sort of ‘sign languages’. More broadly, in many parts of America — North America i know about for certain, and i suspect there are similar phenomena in South America as well — it occasionally happens that Native Americans from different nations, who don't speak the same language or, indeed, have any spoken language at all in common, nevertheless have to come together occasionally for trade or for diplomatic rea- sons. These people have developed rather elaborate sets of gestures which they use in a fairly conventionalized way to communicate across the language boundary.

It's often thought, by people who aren't sufficiently informed or who haven't thought enough about the matter, that the sign languages used by deaf people — what i'm here calling ‘true’ sign languages — are similar to these gestural ‘languages’; but there is a very, very important difference. Sets of gestures such as i've just been talking about may be adequate for the rather limited purposes for which they are intended, but it's important to bear in mind just how limited these purposes are. These people — the merchants in the bazaar, the traders on the floor of the stock exchange, the Native Americans trying to negotiate a trade agreement — aren't using these gestures as their normal, everyday mode of communication but only to accomplish some very specific, limited purpose. For this reason, such ‘sign languages’ are really more like the phenomena in spoken language that are referred to as ‘trade jargons’ or ‘pidgins’. We'll talk more about these next semester, in Chapter 24, but for now it's important to understand that a trade jargon or pidgin language is characterized by a very small vocabulary and a highly simplified grammar. Because of these limitations, it is not capable of serving all the functions that human beings normally use language for. Nor does it need to; it needs to serve only a very limited, minimal range of functions. But for a deaf person, except insofar as hann is able to read and write, sign language is typically the only means hann has to communicate with other people. Assuming that hanns natural language is equivalent to the gestural languages of merchants and traders and Native Americans from different tribes is to assume that it is on the same level of complexity as a trade jargon or pidgin, and that would mean that the deaf person is effectively incapable of the full range of human communication. Which is to rob that person of some of hanns status and dignity as a human being. In short, such an assumption is a monstrous insult.

↑↑↑隨便↑↑↑隨便↑↑↑隨便↑↑↑隨便↑↑↑隨便↑↑↑隨便↑↑↑隨便↑↑↑隨便↑↑↑隨便↑↑↑ Misconception #2: There is basically only one sign language First of all, i have no idea how many sign languages there are in the world right now. I don't think anybody really knows. But there is definitely more than one; i know of several, just off the top of my head. Due to the circumstance that most of the researchers who have recently become interested in the subject happen to be Americans, the one we know the most about is the one known as American Sign Language, Ameslan, or ASL. But there is also a Chinese Sign Language, which as far as i know is used on the mainland; i don't know if it's used here.8 The two are different at every conceivable level.9

8One of my students informed me that there are in fact three different sign languages used in Taiwan; she learned about one when she was a high-school student in Taichung, but she's found that that's quite different from the one

139 For instance, some signs exist in both languages, but mean different things. In Chinese Sign Lan- guage (CSL), as i've already mentioned, the concept ‘father’ is expressed by rubbing the thumb across the lower lip as in Fig. 6.17. The same sign exists in ASL, but it means ‘secret’. Like- wise, in Chinese Sign Language the verb ‘help’ is expressed as in Fig. 6.18; in ASL, this means ‘push’. On the other hand, the same concepts are expressed in different ways in the different languages. For instance, in ASL the concept ‘tree’ is represented by an arm held out and waving like a branch in the wind as in Fig. 6.19; CSL represents the same concept by using the hands to represent a tree-trunk growing up and out as in Fig. 6.20.

Fig. 6.17 CSL ‘父’ Fig. 6.18 CSL ‘助’ ASL ‘secret’ ASL ‘push’

Fig. 6.19 ASL ‘tree’ Fig. 6.20 CSL ‘樹’

The details of ‘hand shape’, the way one's fingers are arranged and the way the hand is oriented with respect to the arm and the rest of the body, are important in sign languages. These details can be thought of as constituting the equivalent of ‘phonemes’ in spoken languages; indeed, some linguists have coined the word ‘cheremes’, from the Greek word for ‘hand’, to refer to them. And just as different human languages select different subsets of the sounds possible from the human vocal tract and organize them differently, so different sign languages organize the reper- toire of physically possible gestures differently, with the result that, just as some combinations of sounds might be grammatical in one spoken language but not in another, so certain gestures are grammatical in one sign language but not in another. For instance, the CSL signs for ‘introduce’ and ‘Wednesday’, shown in Figs. 6.21–22, are impossible signs in ASL. At a more detailed level, consider the CSL sign for ‘distracted’ in Fig. 6.24. Both hands are in the same shape, the thumb and little fingers extended and the other fingers curled up; the two hands are held close together

used in Taipei. Perhaps not surprisingly, at least the one used in Taipei shows some similarity to Japanese Sign Language. 9Source for this information: David Crystal (1987) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge University Press), p. 220.

140 in front of the neck with the palms facing, and then moved apart in a curving motion. This sign doesn't exist in ASL, but the individual parts of it do: as i've already mentioned, the hand shape is used in the sign for ‘yellow’ (Fig. 6.23), and the gesture of moving the hands apart from in front of the neck is used in the sign for ‘separate’ (Fig. 6.25). Here we have an example of CSL and ASL agreeing on the possibility of a hand shape and a gesture, but not on the possibility of com- bining them.

Fig. 6.21 CSL ‘介紹’ Fig. 6.22 CSL ‘禮拜三’

Fig. 6.23 Fig. 6.24 Fig. 6.25 ASL ‘yellow’ CSL ‘忙亂的心境’ ASL ‘separate’

Clearly, American Sign Language and Chinese Sign Language are distinct languages, not only in their vocabularies but in their grammars. But the discrepancy between different sign languages goes deeper than that. After all, English and Chinese are also distinct languages, differing in vocabularies and grammars. Perhaps the difference between ASL and CSL is merely a reflec- tion of the difference between the spoken languages used in the same countries. But now consider this: There is a British Sign Language, and it's not the same as ASL. In fact, there is no good evidence that the two languages are in any way particularly related, even though the ‘normal’ populations of both countries speak what is recognizably the same language. The discovery of this discrepancy was rather momentous. There are theatre companies that cater to the deaf community, companies in which the actors deliver their lines by gesture rather than by voice. Often these companies go on tour, visiting cities with large deaf populations. It turns out that they can't feasibly cross the Atlantic between North America and Great Britain, because American actors using ASL can't be understood by the deaf in Great Britain and British actors using BSL can't be understood by the deaf in America. ASL actually shows much closer, or more obvious, resemblance to the sign languages used in northwestern continental Europe, such as France and Belgium.10

10Indeed, there is a fair amount of historical evidence that American Sign Language evolved out of French Sign Language.

141 Some Further Details of ASL Grammar At this point, i'm going to spend a few minutes talking a little bit more about what little i know about the grammar of American Sign Language. In this language, the signer generally defines a space in front and to both sides of hann, a space of suitable size — not too small but not too large — to allow hanns arms to move around comfortably. In the course of conversation, the signer may have reason to refer to several different people, not only hannself and the person or people hann is conversing with but other people as well who aren't present. As i mentioned a few minutes ago, in American Sign Language a person normally refers to hannself by pointing at hannself and to the people hann is conversing with by pointing at them, and these pointing gestures can be considered the ASL equivalents of 1st- and 2nd-person pronouns.

But what about 3rd person? How does one refer to a person who isn't present by means of gesture? Generally, what happens is that the signer, upon first mentioning someone who isn't present, will sign a complete clause or sentence introducing that person, but keeping hanns hands as much as possible in a specific area of space, one that clearly is not associated with any other person. So, for instance, the signer may mention hanns mother, or teacher, or the mayor of hanns city, and in doing so will make the appropriate gesture for ‘mother’ or ‘teacher' or ‘mayor’ — but in making that gesture will make sure to focus on a specific physical area, e.g. the space near hanns right eye or in front of hanns left shoulder. From that point on for the rest of the conversation, that area of space is identified with that 3rd person, and any indication by the signer of that area is interpreted as a pronoun referring to that person. In this way, the signer is able to carve up the space around hann into several regions, each one associated with a different person hann is talking about. In this respect, ASL is actually much more efficient than most spoken languages i'm acquainted with, which basically have just a 3- or 4-way distinction between pronouns and, if more distinctions are necessary, have to make them by various complex constructions. Thus, in English a sentence like (1) — delivered without any gesture or other disambiguating context — could be quite ambiguous if not totally incomprehensible. But the ASL equivalent would presu- mably be perfectly clear. (1) There was the time when he sold him a horse but delivered a mule which had previously been stolen from him.

Tense in ASL is communicated by means of an imaginary line that begins behind the signer, goes past hanns ear, and reaches out into the area in front, a little below eye-level, as shown in Fig. 6.26. If, in referring to some event, the signer indicates a point on this line behind hanns ear, that means that the event took place at some point in the past; the farther back it is, the farther back in time the event took place. The area right next to the cheek means ‘present’; the portion of the line in front of the signer means ‘future’ and, again, the farther forward the indication is the farther into the future is the reference.

Fig. 6.26 The ASL timeline

142 ASL also has a very complex and highly-developed system of grammatical aspect. I've done my best to represent them in Fig. 6.27–35, in relation to the sign for ‘sick’. The basic concept of ‘sickness’ is expressed in ASL by tapping oneself on the forehead with the middle finger. This gesture can be modified in 8 different ways to express aspectual differences, and grammarians specializing in ASL have come up with names for these 8 different aspects, which i've included in Fig. 6.28–35.

Fig. 6.27 neutral — ‘be sick’

The ‘predispositional’ aspect and the ‘continuative’ aspect, representing in this case respectively the concepts that one is either ‘inclined to be sick’ or ‘sick for a long time’, are both expressed by making three circles in front of the face with the hand whose middle finger taps the forehead at the top of each circle to convey the basic idea of ‘sickness’; the difference is that in the case of the continuative aspect the circles are larger and made more slowly.

Fig. 6.28 predispositional aspect Fig. 6.29 continuative aspect — — ‘tend to be sick’ ‘sick for a long time’

If the tapping is not particularly vigorous but is repeated very often, at very great speed, this is the ‘incessant’ aspect, meaning ‘constantly sick’; if the gesture is repeated very often, at great speed, but the finger doesn't actually hit the forehead but merely comes close, this is the ‘approximative’ aspect, meaning ‘sort of sick, not really very sick, just sort of feeling poorly’. For the tapping to be particularly vigorous and repeated an unusual number of times is to communicate the ‘frequentative’ aspect, meaning ‘often sick’.

Fig. 6.30 Fig. 6.31 Fig. 6.32 incessant aspect approximative aspect frequentative aspect — ‘constantly sick’ — ‘sort of sick’ — ‘often sick’

A single jab of the middle finger towards the forehead communicates the ‘susceptative’ aspect, meaning ‘get sick easily’; a much more vigorous jab, with the finger then held against the forehead for a moment, means ‘very sick’ and is called the ‘intensive aspect’. And a grand gesture

143 in which the hand rises to the forehead, getting faster along the way, to finally strike the forehead with the middle finger is an example of the ‘resultative’ aspect, meaning simply ‘become sick’.

Fig. 6.33 Fig. 6.34 Fig. 6.35 susceptative aspect intensive aspect resultative aspect — ‘get sick easily’ — ‘very sick’ — ‘become sick’

Again, let me point out that all this is characteristic specifically of American Sign Language. I would guess, though i do not know, that other sign languages have similarly rich inflexional systems for aspect; but the details, including the number of aspectual distinctions made, will differ from language to language, just as with spoken languages; sign languages are no different from spoken languages in this respect. Indeed, sign languages are really no different from spoken languages except in that they are visual and gestural rather than spoken and auditory. Misconception #3: Sign language is a gestural representation of spoken language. The misconception that sign language is merely a sort of ‘translation’ or ‘transcription’ of the local spoken language into gestural terms is probably encouraged by the existence of various sorts of manual alphabets and finger spelling. Educators in various parts of the Western world, in the interests of promoting the education of the deaf, have developed what are basically codes for representing the different letters of the alphabet by means of hand signals. In Fig. 6.36 on the next page i've given diagrams of three different such systems, from England, Sweden, and the United States. You'll notice that, just as i noted was the case with American vs. British Sign Language, the English and American manual alphabets are quite different — for one thing, the English one uses both hands while the American one uses only one — in spite of the fact that the spoken languages of both countries are recognizably the same. Many educated people know of the existence of manual alphabets such as these, and it is perhaps not surprising then that, when they see deaf people communicating with each other through sign language, they think, ‘Oh, yes; i know what's going on; they're spelling out words in English (or Swedish, or whatever the language of the surrounding community is), using a manual alphabet.’ I think you will agree that this supposition is very reasonable for someone who doesn't know much about the subject, but i believe that, if you think about the matter a bit, you'll realize that it is quite wrong.

Notice that the manual alphabets i've shown you in Fig. 6.36 all involve nothing but hand-shape, with occasionally a little movement. Compare this with what little i've been able to show you about how a real sign language like ASL works; consider the gestures that communicate the concepts of ‘separate’, ‘yellow’, ‘sick’, and so on. These gestures have nothing to do with any of the manual alphabets in Fig. 6.36. A deaf American communicating the concept ‘sick’ in ASL does not spell out the letters ‘s-i-c-k’ using the American manual alphabet or any other manual alphabet; hann merely taps hanns forehead with hanns middle finger.

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Fig. 6.36 Manual Alphabets

145 With a manual alphabet, fluent signers are able to spell out words, and can do so quite rapidly, almost as rapidly as the words in question can be spoken by a fluent speaker of the appropriate language. But, even when as is typically the case in North America and Western Europe a size- able percentage of the deaf community is sufficiently well-educated to be fluent in the written language of the surrounding hearing community, such ‘finger spelling’ makes up only a very small part of the linguistic activity that goes on within a deaf community. Generally, it's only used as a crutch for representing concepts that are so new to the culture that the community hasn't developed and agreed upon appropriate signs for them yet; typically, in such cases the surrounding hearing community is ahead of the deaf community in coining words for such things, so the deaf when communicating among themselves merely spell out the word used by the hearing until they've been able to come up with an appropriate sign. As far as i know, when an appropriate sign is devised and agreed upon by the deaf community, it never bears any resemblance to the ‘finger- spelled’ version. Conclusion All human beings use gestures to communicate, even those of us who normally communicate by sound. But those who cannot communicate by sound use gestures as their only or principal means of communication. Sign languages are precisely equivalent to ‘normal’ spoken languages; their vocabularies are as rich, their grammars as complex, and they can do everything that spoken languages can do as far as range of types of communication goes. Except, of course, be spoken or heard. And sign languages are as diverse as spoken languages; as i said earlier, i have no idea how many different sign languages there are in the world, but i'd venture a guess that there are a lot of them.

In recent decades, linguists have come to recognize that sign languages are just as valid languages as spoken languages, and just as worthy of study. There are now many linguists, including Prof. Perlmutter whom i mentioned back at the beginning of this chapter, who are doing research on sign languages; there are scholarly conferences devoted entirely to sign languages. There are even deaf linguists (i've met a few) who devote their energies to studying their own native languages and others like them.

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