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American Sign Language, Linguistics of (Valli 1-56368-097-1_cover.p70 1 9/10/03, 12:46 AM LINGUISTICS OF AMERICANSIGNLANGUAGE LINGUISTICS OF AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE An Introduction Third Edition CLAYTON VALLI CEIL LUCAS Clerc Books Gallaudet University Press Washington, D.C. Clerc Books An imprint of Gallaudet University Press Washington, DC 20002 © 1992 , 1995, 2000 by Gallaudet University. All rights reserved. First edition 1992 Third edition 2000 Printed in the United States of America Excerpt from Language: Its Structure and Use by Edward Finegan and Niko Bernier, copyright © 1989 by Harcourt Brace & Com- pany, reprinted by permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Valli, Clayton. Linguistics of American Sign Language : an introduction / Clayton Valli, Ceil Lucas.—3rd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-56368-097-1 1. American Sign Language—Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Lucas, Ceil. II. Title. HV2474 .V35 2001 419—dc21 00-064369 oThe paper used in this publication meets the minimum re- quirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. For William C. Stokoe and for our students “In 1960, when Sign Language Structure and The Calculus of Structure were published . they argued that paying attention to sign language could only interfere with the students’ proper education.” William C. Stokoe May 1988 “The language [ASL] I finally discovered when I was 14 years old made me understand what’s happening around me. For the first time, I understood what was happening and finally started to learn. Now my education brain is blossoming.” Gallaudet undergraduate November 1990 Contents Preface to the Third Edition xi Acknowledgments xiii Introduction xv PART ONE BASIC CONCEPTS Basic Concepts 1 PART TWO PHONOLOGY Unit 1 Signs Have Parts 19 Unit 2 The Stokoe System 25 Unit 3 The Concept of Sequentiality in the Description of Signs 30 Unit 4 The Movement–Hold Model 37 Unit 5 Phonological Processes 42 Unit 6 Summary 47 PART THREE MORPHOLOGY Unit 1 Phonology vs. Morphology 51 Unit 2 Deriving Nouns from Verbs in ASL 53 Unit 3 Compounds 58 Unit 4 Lexicalized Fingerspelling and Loan Signs 64 Unit 5 Numeral Incorporation 72 Unit 6 The Function of Space in ASL 76 Unit 7 Classifier Predicates and Locative Verbs 78 Unit 8 Classifier Predicates and Signer Perspective 88 Unit 9 Subject-Object Agreement 93 Unit 10 Pronouns and Determiners 101 vii viii Contents Unit 11 Temporal Aspect 107 Unit 12 Derivational and Inflectional Morphology 112 Unit 13 Time in ASL 115 PART FOUR SYNTAX Unit 1 Definitions 121 Unit 2 Simple Sentences with Plain Verbs 132 Unit 3 Simple Sentences with Agreement Verbs 136 Unit 4 Basic Sentence Types 139 PART FIVE SEMANTICS Unit 1 The Meaning of Individual Signs 149 Unit 2 The Meaning of Sentences 159 PART SIX LANGUAGE IN USE Unit 1 Variation and Historical Change 167 Unit 2 ASL Discourse 175 Unit 3 Bilingualism and Language Contact 183 Unit 4 Language as Art 190 PART SEVEN SUPPLEMENTAL READINGS Analyzing Signs 199 Robbin Battison File 4—Introduction: What Do You Know When You Know a Language 219 File 5—Introduction: Prescriptive vs. Descriptive Rules of Grammar 223 File 6—Introduction: Arbitrariness in Language 226 Signs Have Parts: A Simple Idea 231 Robbin Battison Contents ix Introduction from A Dictionary of American Sign Language 243 William C. Stokoe, Dorothy C. Casterline, and Carl G. Croneberg File 20—Phonetics: The Sounds of Speech 259 File 30—Phonology: The Value of Sounds: Phonemes 262 American Sign Language: The Phonological Base 267 Scott K. Liddell and Robert E. Johnson File 40—Morphology: The Minimal Units of Meaning: Morphemes 307 File 42—Morphology: The Hierarchical Structure of Words 311 File 43—Morphology: Word Formation Processes 314 The Confluence of Space and Language in Signed Languages 318 Karen Emmorey A Class of Determiners in ASL 347 June Zimmer and Cynthia Patschke Syntax: Sentences and Their Structure 354 Edward Finegan and Niko Besnier Syntax: The Study of Sentence Structure 358 William O’Grady, Michael Dobrovolsky, and Mark Aronoff Semantics: The Study of Meaning 374 William O’Grady, Michael Dobrovolsky, and Mark Aronoff File 120—Regional Variation: The Origin of American Dialects 389 File 123—Regional Variation: Variation at Different Levels 392 Analyzing Variation in Sign Languages: Theoretical and Methodological Issues 394 Rob Hoopes, Mary Rose, Robert Bayley, Ceil Lucas, Alyssa Wulf, Karen Petronio, and Steven Collins Sociolinguistic Aspects of the Black Deaf Community 416 Anthony J. Aramburo Toward a Description of Register Variation in American Sign Language 429 June Zimmer Features of Discourse in an American Sign Language Lecture 443 Cynthia B. Roy Language Contact in the American Deaf Community 458 Ceil Lucas and Clayton Valli Index 481 Preface to the Third Edition In the years since the publication of the first edition of Linguistics of American Sign Language, we have been fortunate to have had the opportunity to communicate with teachers and students who have used the book. During that same time period, we have been using the text in our classes and workshops. The changes in this edi- tion reflect both our experience and the comments received from users. In this new third edition, we set out to refine and clarify the existing text and, at the same time, make substantive changes that reflect the ever-developing lin- guistic thinking about ASL. Readers familiar with the first two editions will find a revised unit on the function of space in ASL and new supplementary readings. In addition, we have added a section on artistic uses of ASL. These changes have been made in order to provide students with a broader understanding of the linguistics of ASL. It is our hope that the users of this text and its accompanying videotape will continue to find them to be useful tools in their exploration of ASL structure. xi Acknowledgments Many people participated in the preparation of these materials. We gratefully ac- knowledge our colleagues in the Department of ASL, Linguistics, and Interpreta- tion at Gallaudet University: Scott K. Liddell for detailed feedback on major por- tions of the text, and Robert E. Johnson and Elizabeth Winston for their feedback and for using the text in their courses on ASL structure. We want to thank Holly Roth and Leslie Rach for using the text and for their valuable feedback, and Sandy Brown of Catonsville Community College for allowing us to field-test the materi- als in the college’s Interpreter Training program. We also thank Ben Bahan, M. J. Bienvenu, Sandra Frankel, Barbara Kannapell, Arlene B. Kelly, Sue Mather, Paul Siegel, Sam Supalla, and Ted Supalla for reviewing the manuscript. We thank Paul Setzer of the Art Department of Gallaudet University for the sign drawings and his models: Steven Collins, Tiri Fellows, Byron Bridges, James Chien Min Chao, and Leslie Saline. We are grateful to Val Dively for providing the snowmobile story for the video- tape and to Robert Hahn for the voiceover. We thank Melanie Metzger, our col- league in the Department of ASL, Linguistics, and Interpretation, for updating the unit on discourse, and Rachel Turniansky and Cheryl Reinagel for preparing the original manuscript. We would like to acknowledge Ivey Pittle Wallace and Jill Hendricks of Gallaudet University Press for their work in the production of the materials. Finally, we owe a significant debt of gratitude to our students and the many workshop participants who gave us their feedback—they played a central role in the development of the text. xiii Introduction We developed Linguistics of American Sign Language because of the lack of mate- rials on American Sign Language (ASL) structure at the undergraduate level. The text emerged over the years as we taught ASL structure to fluent users of the lan- guage. We had two basic goals in writing this text. Our first goal is to teach the basic concepts of linguistics as they pertain to ASL structure. To this end, we introduce fundamental areas of linguistic inquiry— phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and the use of language—and discuss the phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and sociolinguistic struc- ture of ASL. Our discussion reflects the current state of research in these areas, in- cluding the work of individual researchers. We recognize that there is more than one perspective on some aspects of ASL structure. We have chosen to work within the theoretical framework developed by our colleagues in the Department of ASL, Linguistics, and Interpretation at Gallaudet University—Scott K. Liddell and Robert E. Johnson. We also recognize that perspectives on linguistic phenomena are often subject to rapid change, and our materials reflect some of the most sig- nificant changes in perspective. One of the most important concepts we want to convey is that linguistic inquiry is a dynamic and flexible undertaking, not a frozen or static one. In fact, even since the first publication of this book in 1992, perspec- tives on some aspects of sign language structure and its use have changed, and re- search in areas such as discourse and variation has increased dramatically. Our second goal is to teach students to think critically about the structure of ASL and about claims that researchers make about that structure. We encourage students not to memorize linguistic facts, but rather to think about language struc- ture. This text is designed for undergraduate-level students who already know how to sign ASL and who have skills in using the language. For that reason, we set aside the time for class discussions, during which students can think about and question the information being taught. We encourage students to use what they already know to learn about the linguistics of ASL.
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