ASL Questions

These questions are only tangentially related to class, and won't be interesting to everyone. But those who are fluent in a second language, have some experience with the American Sign Language used primarily by the deaf, or have a particular interest in the forms that language takes might find something here to respond to.

I recently read William C. Stokoe's Sign Language Structure. Revised. Silver Spring, MD: Linstok, 1978. I was left with questions, in part because I have very little exposure to ASL itself.

I would like to better understand what Stokoe refers to as "sign modulation," (66). I find this related to inflection in speech, and the moreso to what Emily Dickinson somewhere referred to as "inflections of the pen." I suspect that this will help me understand why the same written piece that works well in print does not work well online and vice versa. The following questions seem related.

1. Stokoe notes Epee's judgment that articles as they exist in French or English "lack a natural sign" for the deaf (6). [Article adjectives include the, a and a in English.] English speakers also say that East-Asian languages "lack" articles, but of course this constitutes no genuine lack because the functionality of articles is handled otherwise.

a) How do East Asian languages handle the functions of articles?
b) How do ASL signers handle these functions?

Since language use is too automatic for native speakers to answer grammatical questions intuitively, the following paragraph, which I use to teach English articles, might make for simple examples.

Mrs. Jones bought Johnny a milkshake. Johnny took the shake into the car, but he spilled it, so there was milkshake all over the back seat.

It's a milkshake at first because the speaker refers to a single discrete, contained beverage. It's the shake afterwards because it has been previously referred to. Readers conclude that this is indeed the same milkshake that Mrs. J just purchased. No article is used in the last because the milkshake, having escaped from its container, is referred to as a material; that is, milkshake is no longer a "count noun." Note that the differences here have little to do with any change in the nature of what is purchased, consumed, or spilled, but has lots to do with speakers' and listeners' relationships to milkshake as it exists in the narrative.

That said, how would the same contextualizations be rendered?

2) In ASL, what other forms "lacked a natural sign" in Épeé's sense? (I would suggest that prepositions, like of, or about might be candidates.)

3) Is there some tendency to handle adverbs modally. For instance, might a sign for "walk quickly" be a sign for "walk," made quickly or with some affectation of rushing? Or might saunter or lollygag constitute differences more naturally performed than distinguished by discrete changes of vocabulary?

4) The notation Stokoe uses for signs resembles Egyptian hieratics of the Middle and Later Kingdoms. How effective is the notation itself for native signers? Do they read it extensively? Do they find it rich, as do readers of English or French or German or Russian?

5) Stokoe mentions what he calls a "0 tab." "Tab" comes from the Latin tabula; he refers to a location of the entire sign relative to the signer's body or to an understood or otherwise signalled locus of conversation. 0 Tab is apparently a comfortable position central to the signer or to the dialog.

a) Does a return to 0 Tab function in any way like punctuation? That is, does a return to comfortable center or such a gesture signal the end of a phrase, sentence, or something like a paragraph?

b) How are such differences distinguished?

c) What relation does this seem to have to other significant patterns, like the return to a base chord at the end of a musical phrase, passage, pr sonota; or the repetition in an essay's conclusion of keywords from a thesis statement.

6) How do the deaf sign poetry? How much and in what ways does that resemble dance?

7) What about what Stokoe calls "sign modulation" -- that is, the sign means something different, even becomes syntactically different because it's signed somewhat differently? Can this (and how can it) be distinguished from non-syntactic gestures and attitudes that may add meaning to a sign (such as someone's being visibly emphatic, angry, loving, entreating, or whatever; this is page 66 in Stokoe, BTW).