This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from Explore Bristol Research, http://research-information.bristol.ac.uk Author: Sutton-Spence, Rachel Title: The role of the manual alphabet and fingerspelling in British sign language. General rights Access to the thesis is subject to the Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International Public License. A copy of this may be found at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode This license sets out your rights and the restrictions that apply to your access to the thesis so it is important you read this before proceeding. Take down policy Some pages of this thesis may have been removed for copyright restrictions prior to having it been deposited in Explore Bristol Research. However, if you have discovered material within the thesis that you consider to be unlawful e.g. breaches of copyright (either yours or that of a third party) or any other law, including but not limited to those relating to patent, trademark, confidentiality, data protection, obscenity, defamation, libel, then please contact [email protected] and include the following information in your message: •Your contact details •Bibliographic details for the item, including a URL •An outline nature of the complaint Your claim will be investigated and, where appropriate, the item in question will be removed from public view as soon as possible. THE ROLE OF THE MANUAL ALPHABET AND FINGERSPELLING IN BRITISH SIGN LANGUAGE RACHEL SUTTON-SPENCE A dissertation submitted to the University of Bristol in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. July, 1994 I certify that this dissertation is my own independent work and has not been presented previously for any other degree. Signed* Date: To iii it ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The research in this dissertation would not have been possible without the help of a great many people. My advisor Bencie Woll has provided invaluable support, both moral and academic, throughout the time of my research and writing up. I could not have wanted for more from an advisor. The collection of the necessary data was only possible through the good will of many deaf and hearing signers, who not only agreed to take part in the formal studies, but also entered into innumerable impromptu discussions on all sorts of aspects of fingerspelling. Particular thanks go to Gloria Pullen who has been involved with the research from the start and has spent many hours discussing fingerspelling, often preceded by the laughably inaccurate request "Can I just ask you a quick question?". Gloria helped me make the source material for Study 5. Few other people would have had the patience, generosity and fingerspelling skills to help in the way that she did. All the staff and students at the Centre for Deaf Studies have been involved in some way in the creation of this work, and I am grateful to all of them. Information on wide-ranging aspects of the subject area came from colleagues and friends on the E-mail, particularly from Tane Akamatsu, James McQueen and Jill Rudd. Countless other people, too numerous to mention by name, have responded from all over the world to my requests for information. Mary Plackett at the RNID library was never anything less than helpful in all my visits, and 1 am very grateful for her permission to photograph several of the library's oldest texts. lam also grateful to Simon Carmel for his kind permission to reproduce several of his drawings of manual alphabets from around the world. Bridget Peace drew the original illustrations in Figures 1.1, 1.5, and 1.29. For the first twenty months of the research period (from March 1991 to December 1992), 1 was supported financially by the Economic and Social Research Council, grant number R00429024933. Finally, my thanks go to all my friends and family who tried to judge the right moment to ask "How's the PhD going?", and to Kerry for all her love, support and washing-up. ABSTRACT The research reported here is a description of, and explanation for, the use of the manual alphabet and fingerspelling in the signing of the British deaf community. This is conducted within theoretical frameworks already existing in mainstream and sign language linguistics. There are four main strands in the research, each addressing a separate question within the main aim. The history of the British manual alphabet per se has not been documented in great detail before. In this research, the British manual alphabet is traced back to the mid-seventeenth century. Succeeding manual alphabets are described and the features of their evolution commented upon. As many alphabet charts as possible are illustrated. Other two-handed manual alphabets in use in the world are also described. The use of the manual alphabet by British deaf signers is described, qualitatively and quantitatively, demonstrating that it serves as a major lexical resource for borrowing, and also to permit code-switching. The overall use, and the form of the signs produced using the manual alphabet are shown to vary in variants of BSL. The form of signs using the manual alphabet are shown to be dictated by an interaction of linguistic and sociolinguistic factors. The phonology and morphology of BSL interact with the orthography and morphology of the English word to produce the final form used. Using the basic description of restructuring of lexicalised fingerspellings in ASL devised by Battison (1978), the restructuring of fingerspellings used by BSL signers is shown to undergo many similar changes, but also to behave somewhat differently due to the two-handed nature of British fingerspelling. As well as the lexicalised fingerspellings described by Battison, this research identifies the influences involved in the creation of single manual letter signs, and of fingerspellings derived from polymorphemic English words. The research has important implications for a sign linguistics field which, until recently, has virtually ignored parts of sign languages strongly influenced by English. It demonstrates that even when the source for a sign is English, the sign language influences the form and meaning of the derived sign. It is also of direct relevance to mainstream linguistics, demonstrating that the processes and constraints of borrowing between languages can be observed in borrowing between the written forms of spoken languages and signed languages, just as in borrowing between spoken languages. LIST OF CONTENTS VOLUME 1 Chapter 1 THE MANUAL ALPHABET AND BRITISH SIGN LANGUAGE 1.0 INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 THE MANUAL ALPHABET AND FINGERSPELLING 2 1.1.1 Spoken Language Analogies for Fingerspelling use 5 1.1.2 Fingerspelling as a Tertiary Form of Communication 6 A Comparison of Fingerspeffing with Morse Code. 8 1.2 BRITISH SIGN LANGUAGE 11 1.2.1 Problems of Defining BSL 11 The Problem of Nomenclature 13 1.2.2 Lexical Expansion in British Sign Language 20 1.3 VARIATION IN USE OF FINGERSPELLING 19 1.4 REJECTION OF FINGERSPELLING AS PART OF BSL 22 1.5 CATEGORISATION OF USES OF THE MANUAL ALPHABET 27 1.6 THE AIM OF THIS RESEARCH 28 1.6.1 The Structure of the Dissertation 31 1.6.2 Proposals Concerning the Different uses of the Manual Alphabet 32 Chapter 2 THE HISTORY OF THE MANUAL ALPHABET 2.0 INTRODUCTION 36 2.1 THE EARLIEST FINGERSPELLING 37 i 2.2 THE EUROPEAN MANUAL ALPHABETS 40 2.2.1 The Early Manual Alphabet in Spain 40 2.2.2 The Manual Alphabet in France 43 2.3.3 The Manual Alphabet in Other Countries 45 2.3 THE EARLY BRITISH ARTHROLOGICAL SYSTEM 46 2.4 THE FORE-RUNNER OF THE MODERN BRITISH MANUAL ALPHABET 54 2.5 THE MODERN BRITISH MANUAL ALPHABET 58 2.5.1 Defoe's Manual Alphabet 58 2.5.2 Chances in the British Manual Alphabet since 1732 61 Changes in the Manual Letter -f- 63 Changes in the Manual Letter -h- 64 Changes in the Manual Letter -j- 65 Changes in the Manual Letter -x- 66 Changes in the Manual Letter -z- 66 2.6 UNADOPTED MANUAL ALPHABETS 67 2.7 "ALTERNATIVE" MANUAL LETTERS IN THE BRITISH 72 MANUAL ALPHABET 2.8 TWO-HANDED MANUAL ALPHABETS IN OTHER COUNTRIES 76 2.8.1 Two-handed Alphabets in Former Colonies 76 The Manual Alphabet in India 76 The Manual Alphabet in Africa 77 The Manual Alphabet in Australia 77 The Manual Alphabet in New Zealand 77 The Manual Alphabet in Canada 78 2.8.2. The Two-handed Alphabet in the Rest of the World 78 The Manual Alphabet in the Former Yugoslavia 79 The Manual Alphabet in Indonesia 79 The Manual Alphabet in Norway 79 The Manual Alphabet in Germany 80 The Manual Alphabet of Grand Cayman Island 81 The Two-handed Manual Alphabet in the USA 81 The Cistercian Manual Alphabet 83 2.9 SUMMARY 84 Chapter 3 THE ROLE OF FINGERSPELLING IN DEAF EDUCATION 3.0 INTRODUCTION 86 3.1 SIGN LANGUAGES BEFORE DEAF EDUCATION 87 3.2 PHILOSOPHIES OF DEAF EDUCATION 88 3.3 THE USE OF FINGERSPELLING IN EARLY DEAF EDUCATION 93 3.3.1 Fingerspelling in Early Spanish Deaf Education 93 3.3.2 Fingerspelling in Early British Deaf Education 95 3.3.3 Fingerspelling in Early French Deaf Education 98 3.3.4 Fingerspellinci in Early German Deaf Education 101 3.5.5 Fingerspelling in Early American Deaf Education 103 3.4 THE USE OF FINGERSPELLING IN BRITISH DEAF EDUCATION SINCE THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 106 3.4.1 Fincerspelling in the 19th Century 106 3.4.2 Recent Changes in Fingerspelling in British Deaf Education 110 3.5 SUMMARY 112 Chapter 4 THE ROLE OF THE MANUAL ALPHABET AND FINGERSPELLING IN LEXICAL BORROWING IN BSL 4.0 INTRODUCTION 114 4.1 THE PHONOLOGY OF THE MANUAL ALPHABET AND FINGERSPELLING 115 4.1.1 The Status of Manual