Number, Colour and Kinship in New Zealand Sign Language Rachel
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Number, colour and kinship in New Zealand Sign Language Rachel McKee 1. NZSL and its lexicon The domains of number, colour and kinship in New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) highlight diachronic variation and change in the lexicon. A brief outline of NZSL's history provides context for this variation. Overlap in the lexicons of NZSL, Auslan and BSL evinces a close dialectal relationship between these varieties of the 'BANZSL' family (Johnston 2003; McKee and Kennedy 2000; Schembri et al. 2010; Woll 1987). But the rela- tionship between them is not a straightforward divergence from a common mother language (BSL) through time and geographical separation. External intervention via the deaf education system, and ongoing contact between deaf nationals of these three nations have also had an effect. Although some 'early' NZSL signs are clearly of BSL origin, possibly brought by adult deaf immigrants from the UK, contact with BSL in the period following colo- nisation of New Zealand from the 1860s onwards was probably limited by the distance between northern and southern hemispheres. In the late 19th century, before a deaf school was established in the new colony, some New Zealand children were sent abroad to residential deaf schools in Australia, in which British and Irish sign languages were used, (Collins-Ahlgren, 1989; Fitzgerald 1999). It is known that at least one British-trained, hearing teacher of the deaf was employed as a tutor to a large family of deaf children in New Zealand during the 1870s, and used British signs with them (Collins- Ahlgren, 1989). But to a large extent, it seems that the early generations of deaf people in New Zealand created their own signs in the context of oralist residential schools dating from 1880 onwards. Convergence between NZSL and Auslan vocabulary increased sharply with the introduction of Australasian1 Signed English (ASE) into deaf educa- tion in both countries from the 1970s (1979 in New Zealand). The consensus among educators at the time was that the New Zealand sign lexicon was not extensive enough for use in education (Dugdale 2000). Vocabulary was 352 Rachel McKee drawn mainly from Auslan, which included some BSL-origin signs that were also in the NZSL lexicon. Sets of number, colour and kinship signs (among others) selected for the ASE system were adopted from Auslan used in the state of Victoria (Jeanes, Jeanes and Reynolds 1982), much of which had historical origins in BSL (Johnston & Schembri, 2007). At the time that ASE was introduced, NZSL lexicon in these domains was limited. Polysemous or generic manual signs were used to indicate semantic categories such as colour, month, relative, and city, with reference speci- fied by the mouthing of an English word (Levitt 1985, McKee and McKee 2001, McKee and McKee 2007). The early lexicon of NZSL has similarities with systems described for other small-scale or emerging languages. A para- digm of context-dependent, polysemous signs is also described by Hoyer (2007) in the emergent variety of Albanian Sign Language, and Nyst (2007) reports ‘simultaneous manual-mouthing’ constructions using generic signs in Adamorobe Sign Language in semantic domains such as colour, shape, size or kin. Fox (2007) notes the progressive differentiation of colour terms through time, in the lexical system of Al-Sayyid Bedouin, a young sign language with few specific colour signs. Washabaugh (1986) observed that highly context-dependent lexicon is characteristic of a sign language that exists in conditions of limited diffusion and limited inter-generational depth – descriptors which fit the demographic conditions for NZSL in the century preceding the introduction of ASE in 1979. The domains of number, colour and kinship were substantially relexified post-1979. Recent analysis of lexical variation shows that signs from the earlier paradigm are retained, particularly by older signers, and that some local innovations have also appeared (McKee, McKee and Major 2011). The NZSL number system today is similar to, but distinct in certain respects from the neighbouring language Auslan. Colour and kinship terms have also converged with Auslan in the last 30 years. The typology of number, colour and kinship domains described here for NZSL therefore reflects hybridity between an original paradigm that was not highly specified, and a modern lexicon that is more specified and morphologically elaborated. 2. Number Expression of number concepts in NZSL exhibits considerable sociolinguistic variation, for the reasons outlined above. A dictionary of NZSL published in 1997 (Kennedy, Arnold, Dugdale, Fahey and Moskovitz 1997) records thirty forms representing the numerals zero to twenty. A previous dictionary Number, colour and kinship in New Zealand Sign Language 353 (Levitt 1986) records a further seventeen signs for numbers between one to twenty that are not in the 1997 dictionary – practically an entire alter- nate set, including an ‘air-writing’ (tracing) form for numbers eleven to twenty. The strategy of tracing letters and numbers (above ten) is still used by some elderly signers rather than conventional fingerspelling or number systems (Collins-Ahlgren 1989; Forman 2003). A third scholarly descrip- tion of NZSL (Collins-Ahlgren 1989) describes yet other number signs that appear in neither of the other two publications. The only numbers that are identically represented in these three lexicons are one, two, four and five, although all publications were based on reliable informant data collected within approximately one decade of each other. Air-writing (or tracing), and some earlier two-handed forms of numbers 6 to 10 found in the 1986 and 1989 publications that are now considered rare or archaic are not included in the 1997 dictionary. All entries in the 1997 dictionary were validated by ninety individuals from a representative cross-section of the deaf community (Kennedy, Arnold, Dugdale, Fahey and Moskovitz 1997); this suggests that at the time of that research, earlier expressions of number (those recorded in Levitt and Collins-Ahlgren’s preceding work) were no longer regarded by the community as signs in common use. 2.1. Cardinal numbers The NZSL cardinal number system reflects number concepts in the English language, including a base ten structure in the ordering of larger and smaller units (as also described for BSL by Skinner 2007:60). A ‘zero’ sign expresses negative number and quantity and is also used to express negative existence or to negate a predicate. As in most varieties of BSL and in Auslan, cardinal numbers are formed with extended digits, starting from the extended index finger as one, and index and middle finger for two. Number three has variant forms using three different combinations of adjacent extended fingers; the most frequent is the index, middle, ring finger combination. Cardinal or counting numbers are made with the palm facing the signer, except for a variant of 10 which flicks the fingers palm outwards. For numbers 1–5, the fingers point upright, while in numbers 6 - 9 and 11 -19, the blade is down, fingers pointing sideways to the left (except earlier vari- ants of 11 and 12 which have a different form). Numbers six to ten are also produced with one hand, palm facing the signer, although an older variant of ten uses two ‘five’ hands. Numbers zero to ten are shown in figure 1. 354 Rachel McKee zero zero one two three three four five six (Aus) seven (Aus) seven (early) eight (Aus)/three eight eight (early) eight nine (Aus) nine (early) nine ten (Aus) ten (early) Figure 1. Cardinal numbers 0-10 (including variants) Number, colour and kinship in New Zealand Sign Language 355 2.2. Iconicity in cardinal numbers The number of extended fingers in signs for one to five, and the two-handed ten iconically represent number meaning. These signs are transparent to non-signers and overlap with counting gestures used by hearing people in New Zealand. Two-handed forms of six to ten (non-dominant five hand, plus extended digits on dominant hand), used more by signers over the age of 65, are also transparent in this way. However, representation is not entirely literal for numbers above five: for example, an optional ‘five’ non-domi- nant hand may be overtly expressed or dropped in some variants of numbers between six and ten (cf. Skinner 2007). The handshapes of modern forms of six (Auslan), seven (Auslan), a variant of nine (‘thumb down’), and a variant of eleven (two fingers tracing vertical lines, see figure 3) have an element of iconicity possibly motivated by the shape of written numerals. Whether the handshapes of numbers six and seven are actually motivated by written numbers is unclear, since they also fit into a sequence of ‘five plus-one- digit’, and ‘five-plus-two-digit’ structure, followed by eight and nine in the same format. As seen in figure 1, homophonous variants of three and eight exist; that is, the same three fingers used by some signers to mean ‘three’, may be used by other signers to mean ‘eight’, and vice-versa. Some signers main- tain a distinction in meaning between three and eight through finger orien- tation - three points upwards, while eight points sideways (following the two-handed system for dominant hand digits in 6–9); some individuals are observed to use identical manual forms for three and eight, specified by mouthing. 2.3. Cardinal numbers above 10 NZSL has lexical signs for large number units above ten: hundred, thou- sand, and million (see figure 2). These can be combined with cardinal numbers to create complex numbers such as 400, 10,000, 100,000, expressed in the same word order as English. Multiples of a hundred are formed by moving a number handshape, (one to nine), under the chin, palm down. This form of number incorporation is borrowed from Auslan (Johnston and Schembri 2007).