13.1 — Videos of sign languages

American Sign Language

Below are some examples of simple sentences in American Sign Language (ASL), three versions of ‘Who did John see yesterday?’

The first (i.e. (1)) shows the normal form of the question; notice that WHO remains in the position of an ordinary object, the position that would be occupied by JANE in JOHN SAW JANE YESTERDAY. (Notice that word order is the same as in English.) The second and third versions (i.e. (2) and (3)), where the sign for WHO occurs at the end of the sentence, have focus or emphasis on the who — roughly like Who did John see yesterday?

The abbreviation whq stands for ‘wh-question’, that is, a question about ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘when’, and refers to a cluster of properties including furrowed brows, squinted eyes, and slight side-to-side shakes of the head.

Watch the videos carefully and try to identify these features, and thus the whq.

In the ordinary form of the question (as in (1)), the whq features extend over the entire sentence. In the emphatic question, they can either extend over the whole sentence (as in (2)), or they can apply just to the question word WHO, as shown in (3).

(1)	whq JOHN SEE WHO YESTERDAY ‘Who did John see yesterday?’ (1) Side view. (1) Front view.  Play both views simultaneously.
(2)	whq JOHN SEE tj YESTERDAY WHOj ‘Who did John see yesterday?’ (2) Side view. (2) Front view.  Play both views simultaneously.
(3)	whq JOHN SEE tj YESTERDAY WHOj ‘Who did John see yesterday?’ (3) Side view. (3) Front view.  Play both views simultaneously.

Videos courtesy of National Center for Sign Language and Gestures Resources, Boston University (directors Carol Neidle and Stan Sclaroff). Thanks also to Lana Cook for permission to use them.

Associated with this Center is the American Sign Language Linguistic Research Project (ASLLRP) which provides access to a linguistically annotated ASL corpus and a sign bank.

Ts’ixa Sign Language

The following is the video of Maxwell Kebuelemang signing the short piece in Tshàúkák’ùí (Ts’ixa Sign Language) from which the four photographs of Figure 13.5 were extracted.

Ts’ixa video

The following is a free translation into English provided by the signer (and slightly edited).

You and me, the two of us, will wake up early tomorrow morning. We’ll meet by the bush. When you see a giraffe, you will kill it. Me, I’ll take the bone and smash it with a rock. And I’ll pour the marrow onto the meat. And then I’ll eat it with you. As we eat, the marrow will drip down from our fingers, and I’ll be licking it.

Thanks to Maxwell Kebuelemang for providing this example for the book. 

Wikipedia (this page also contains links to a number of Wikipedia articles on particular deaf sign languages).

Ethnologue and Glottolog each list over one hundred sign languages of various types, including deaf sign languages and alternate sign languages. (Their classification is not the same as that adopted in this textbook.)

You will find numerous corpora and sign banks (or sign language dictionaries) for a range of sign languages on the internet (too many to list here) by searching for the language name. Or click here to find an extensive list.

Alternate Sign Languages

In Aboriginal Australia a number of sign languages were used by widows (usually for six months or so after the death of their husband). See the Wikipedia entry.

Plains Indian Sign Language was used mainly to facilitate communication between Native Americans residing Great Plains of the USA and Canada who spoke mutually unintelligible languages. Some useful websites are: Wikipedia and Plains Indian Sign Language (which includes a short sample of signs, though few of the links on this site worked when I last accessed it).

13.3. Test your Knowledge for this Chapter