Introduction

This chapter presents case studies of sign language transmission in European countries in which the majority of inhabitants all speak a Germanic-based language. Owing to space constraints, we are focusing in this chapter on Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands as examples of the past and current practices of language transmission in this part of Europe, but by no means should this overview be interpreted as being inclusive of other countries of the region.

Transmission of the three sign languages of Switzerland

The spoken language situation in Switzerland

Switzerland recognizes four “National Languages,” which are those used by the majority of people in different geographical regions of the country: Eighteen cantons are primarily German-speaking, five French, one Italian, one bilingual French/German and one trilingual canton where German, Italian and Rhaeto-Romansh are spoken. “National Languages,” however, have historically not been the same as the “Official Languages,” which are those that can be used legally at the federal level. Romansh, for example, became an official language only in 1996. The “mother tongues” actually spoken by Swiss people in their families and local communities are not necessarily either “national” or “official” languages. “Mother tongue” languages used by a large number of persons on a daily basis include the several regional dialects of “Swiss German” and, as approximately 20 percent of the population living in Switzerland have foreign roots, such languages as Spanish, Portuguese, Serb, Croatian, Albanian and English.

Introduction

Every evening, the Al Jazeera satellite channel features a one-hour, comprehensive newscast of world events. Superimposed in the corner of the television screen is a box containing a sign language interpreter who translates the spoken Arabic of the newscaster. The interpreter is one of a team of Jordanian Sign Language (LIU) interpreters who regularly interpret the newscast. However, the sign language they use is not strictly LIU. Heavily influenced by LIU, it is a newly devised sign language which uses vocabulary drawn from different Arab sign languages, including Egyptian Sign Language and Saudi Sign Language. The vocabulary was compiled in a dictionary by the Council of Arab Ministers of Social Affairs (CAMSA), a committee within the League of Arab States (LAS).

The effort by CAMSA to encourage a standard pan-Arab Sign Language (ArSL) has been met with wide resistance, in large part because deaf viewers say they cannot understand the language. In this paper, we describe the geography of sign languages in Arab countries. As we explain, there already exists a number of sign languages used by Arab deaf communities. Some are designated as nation-state sign languages and are used in the instruction of deaf students in their educational systems. The adoption of ArSL by Arab countries potentially threatens the future of these nation-state sign languages as well as an unknown number of smaller sign languages existing within this region.

Introduction

The analysis in this chapter addresses the question of why sign languages look more similar to each other than spoken languages do. It is generally recognized that this has something to do with the “form–meaning mapping,” but previous attempts at addressing this question have been limited in their scope. It will be necessary to take a fresh look at “form” and “meaning” so that the relationship between them can be carefully described without confusion in the uses of words like “path” and “event.” Additionally, special attention will be paid to the various linguistic levels, notably “morpheme,” “lexical item,” “verb phrase,” and “clause,” in order to be clear about the claims. The model presented has been tested most extensively on American Sign Language (ASL) and Austrian Sign Language (ÖGS) (Wilbur 2003, 2005, 2008; Schalber 2004, 2006; Schalber & Grose 2006; Grose, Wilbur & Schalber 2007; Grose 2008).

Traditionally, the relationship between semantics (meaning) and phonology (form) has been taken as an arbitrary mapping into morphemes stored in the lexicon and learned individually during the acquisition process. Such arbitrariness has been considered a defining characteristic of “true” language (Saussure 1916, Hockett 1960). Onomatopoetic words have been considered to be the only exceptions to the arbitrariness requirement. Gasser (2004, Gasser, Sethuraman & Hockema 2005) argues from experimental data that “arbitrariness makes sense” to help keep large numbers of form–meaning associations separate by treating them as categories.

Introduction

This chapter will discuss the overall context in Poland in which “non hearing” persons live and work, and also the modes of transmission of sign systems in Poland, including what will be referred to as the natural variety of Polish Sign Language (PJM, polski język migowy), which has arisen organically from interactions from within this community. The goal of this chapter is to bring forth the specificity of the Polish condition and its dilemmas.

Non-hearing persons living in Poland constitute a unique community worthy of its own description and examination. They are a diverse group, both in terms of their functional language performance as well as their various social properties. Unfortunately, broad conclusions about the deaf community are often drawn from singular phenomenon, small non-representative samples, or even individual cases. The conclusions derived in such a matter can be quite harmful, for “individual features cannot be representative of a collective” (Babiński 1998:13); they can only be characteristic of a specific number or group of people.

The assessment of “non-hearing” environments in Poland is typically based on data derived from pedagogical and applied linguistics research, which tends to focus more on spoken rather than signed language. Moreover, scholarly works about this community tends to focus on practical applications for the education of non-hearing persons, and there is more attention on deaf education (surdo-pedagogy) rather than on deaf studies (surdo-logy).

Introduction

Sign languages share a common inventory of properties that are used to mark prosodic constituents (e.g., nonmanuals of the face or properties of movement and rhythm; see Quer and Pfau, this volume). This chapter investigates whether there is crosslinguistic variation in the use of one prosodic cue – eye blinks – to mark prosodic constituents in sign languages. We will compare the prosodic use of blinks across four sign languages – Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL), Japanese Sign Language (JSL), Swiss German Sign Language (DSGS) and American Sign Language (ASL). In the last fifteen years there has been significant work done in sign language phonology with regard to prosodic structure. Miller (1996), Wilbur (1994a), Boyes Braem (1999), Wilbur and Patschke (1999), Nespor and Sandler (1999), Sandler (1999a, 1999b), Brentari and Crossley (2002), Sandler and Lillo-Martin (2006) and Eccarius and Brentari (2007) have worked on various prosodic constituents, including the Intonational Phrase, the Phonological Phrase and the Prosodic Word (also called “Phonological Word” in Nespor & Vogel 1986). The studies presented here are built upon these earlier analyses, expanding our knowledge of crosslinguistic variation of the blinks.

The following research questions are addressed in this chapter. First, how much variation exists among sign languages in their use of a prosodic cue, such as blinks? Second, if crosslinguistic variation exists, what factors condition it? Third, are blinks always associated with intonational phrases crosslinguistically?

Introduction

Language transmission is a natural and hence nearly invisible phenomenon for many of the world's language communities. Typically, and without noticeable difficulty, infants acquire the spoken languages of their families and caregivers. Transmission attracts notice when family languages are not national languages, when children must learn national languages in other contexts, for example through social institutions like schools. This is a common occurrence all over the world, and can have serious impacts on teaching and learning, as well as on relations among families and schools. Often the addition of a national language to the home language in a child's language repertoire does not affect the home language. For example, although a Dutch immigrant child in Vancouver, Canada, may use Dutch for very limited functions and fail to pass it on to her own Canadian-born children, the continuity of the Dutch language itself is not threatened. In other cases, notably those of some sign languages, minority language status threatens the survival of the language itself.

Transmission of sign languages in almost all geographic contexts is difficult to take for granted. The processes it depends on are not obvious, although the problems it confronts reflect the social, political and economic pressures that other minority languages overcome to survive. When a deaf child is born into a hearing family, parents who do not know a natural sign language cannot pass it along to their child. Additionally, hearing loss is usually interpreted as a deviation from normality.

Introduction

Consider the following visual representations for the concept number 3”:

Photographs (Figure 8.1), drawings (Figure 8.2), videotapes and sound tapes are examples of recordings of linguistic data. Although they vary in their degree of data “fidelity” due to the fact that any recording necessarily makes a selection from all the data points present in an actual utterance and its context, these recordings stay close to the actual utterance. They can be collected, but the collection cannot be sorted into subsets nor can subsets be counted meaningfully because a recording is a non-analytic representation of the perceptible side or form of a linguistic utterance. For example, without a notation system, one cannot select all recordings that show all fingers extended in a corpus of American Sign Language (ASL) signs.

Figure 8.3 throughFigure 8.8 are notations of a linguistic utterance. Figure 8.3, Figure 8.4 and Figure 8.5 show writing systems, Figure 8.6 and Figure 8.7 transcription systems, and Figure 8.8 a coding system we are developing for signed languages. Notations, unlike recordings, intentionally abstract away from the original linguistic events in ways not dictated by limitations of the recording process or “artistic license,” but by (more or less) systematic decisions to annotate or symbolize only some (discrete) elements of the original signal. In almost all cases, they are part of an analytic system of some kind, but they differ from each other in what they represent, how they do it and their goals.

Introduction

This chapter aims at presenting an overview of sign language transmission and use in three Southern European countries in the Mediterranean area: Greece, Italy and Spain. As will become clear, the reality of signers and the vicissitudes of deaf education and sign language recognition are roughly comparable in the three countries, which is mainly amenable to the social and political similarities among them. In some aspects, the shared features differentiate them from Northern European countries, but at the same time the evolution observed is parallel to those of Western countries, albeit at a different pace at times.

The sign languages present in these countries are the following: Greek Sign Language (GSL; Ελληνική Νοηματική Γλώσσα, ΕΝΓ/Elinikí Noimatikí Glósa, ENG) in Greece; Italian Sign Language (LIS, Lingua dei Segni Italiana) in Italy, Spanish Sign Language (Lengua de Signos Española, LSE) in Spain and Catalan Sign Language (Llengua de Signes Catalana, LSC) in Catalonia. Here we will adopt the established acronyms in the spoken languages of the respective countries, except for the Greek case, where we use the English acronym for typographical unification.

Research about different aspects of these languages is relatively recent and it often covers partial areas. The results presented in this chapter are mainly obtained from the existing literature, but also from interviews and observations collected in the contact with the respective Deaf communities.

Introduction

Of the five parameters of sign language structure – handshape, movement, place of articulation, orientation and nonmanual behaviors – handshape is the parameter that has been analyzed most successfully with a variety of methodologies, both theoretical and experimental. Since it is here that we find the most complete body of work to draw upon, we have chosen to examine handshape behavior as a way of better understanding the nature of phonological contrast in signed languages. The goal of this chapter is twofold. First we will draw attention to the range of variation in the form and use of handshapes, and second, we will analyze the distribution of handshape properties. We will also investigate these issues both crosslinguistically and language-internally in order to determine which features are phonologically contrastive and where they are contrastive in the lexicon.

In order to achieve our goal of showing how sign languages use handshape in their phonological systems, a little background is necessary on both the organization of a sign language lexicon and the phonological structure of signed languages. After covering this introductory material and our methodology in sections 1 and 2, we will describe differences in the way that handshape feature classes are used across the three components of the lexicon (foreign, core and spatial) in three different sign languages – namely, American Sign Language (ASL), Swiss German Sign Language (DSGS) and Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL).

Introduction

Verb agreement is a topic that has received much attention in the sign language literature. Figure 9.1 shows what is often called “verb agreement” in the literature. This phenomenon has been noted in many signed languages.

The two signs, taken from American Sign Language (ASL), both describe a person asking another person. The difference lies in which of the two persons is asking the other. In the absence of prior context, the first sign means I asked someone while the second sign means someone asked me. They differ only in the orientation and direction of movement; in the first example, the hand is oriented and moves away from the signer's body, and in the other, it is oriented and moves in the opposite direction, toward the body. Such changes in the orientation and direction of movement are linked to the change in meaning described above. The phenomenon has several properties in almost all of the sign languages documented to date that make it look different from verb agreement in spoken languages.

For a working definition of agreement, the chapter follows Corbett's (2006) criteria for canonical agreement. He starts with a broad definition from Steele (1978: 610): “the term agreement commonly refers to some systematic covariance between a semantic or formal property of one element and a formal property of another.” Then, he distinguishes four necessary aspects of agreement – controller, target, domain and feature – and defines each as follows:

Introduction

In this chapter we will deal with the “signed syllable,” a unit of increasing interest in sign language phonology since the early 1980s. In general, we aim to give an overview of the syllable's nature and role in sign languages, focusing especially on the research done on American Sign Language (ASL) and Finnish Sign Language (FinSL). More specifically, our goals are: (i) to introduce the concept of the syllable, and argue for the existence of the syllable, in signed language; (ii) to present and compare, on a general level, the main models of the structure of the signed syllable and (iii) to contrast and compare the signed syllable with its spoken language counterpart. As regards a theoretical framework, most work on the signed syllable has been influenced by “generative phonology” (Kenstowicz 1994). Consequently, all the theories and models discussed in this chapter also belong to this school.

The syllable has already been investigated in a number of sign languages, most notably in ASL (e.g., Wilbur 1991, Perlmutter 1992, Sandler 1993, Brentari 1998), but also, for example, in Sign Language of the Netherlands (van der Kooij 2002) and Israeli Sign Language (Nespor & Sandler 1999). Recently, the syllable has also begun to be studied in FinSL (Jantunen 2005, 2006, 2007). From the point of view of exploring similarities and differences between sign languages, the data from FinSL, which we will present in this chapter, adds to our understanding of the crosslinguistic nature of the signed syllable.

Introduction

Even casual observation reveals that language users sometimes have different ways of saying or signing the same thing. Variation may be realized at all different levels of a language. English, for example, contains numerous examples of variation in the lexicon. Some American speakers use the word couch, while others say sofa or davenport. American Sign Language (ASL) also exhibits many well-known examples of lexical variation. For example, a number of signs exist for the concepts BIRTHDAY, PICNIC or HALLOWEEN.

At the phonological level, variation exists in the individual segments that make up words or signs or in parts of those segments. For example, speakers of a wide range of English dialects sometimes delete the final consonant of words that end in consonant clusters such as test, round or past, the result being tes', roun' and pas' (Labov et al. 1968, Guy 1980). In ASL, phonological variation can be seen in all of the parts that make up signs – in the handshape, movement, location and palm orientation, and sometimes even in the nonmanual features that are part of sign production. The basic structure of these parts is discussed in other chapters of this volume.

Variation may also occur in the morphological and syntactic components of a language. For example, in African American Vernacular English (AAVE), the copula be is variably deleted, and the sentences He is my brother and He my brother both occur.

Introduction

Since the mid 1970s, sign language researchers have debated how to analyze signs that denote an entity's motion or state of being located somewhere, signs with some similarity between the sign form and the sign meaning (for an overview of the discussions, see Schembri2003 and papers in Emmorey 2003). One example is seen in Figure 12.1 from a Swedish signer's description of how a boy falls from a tree to the ground. The signer's hands can be seen as representing the boy and some surface related to the tree, respectively, and the movement of her right hand as representing the motion aspects of the boy's fall. Within the framework of functional linguistics and its interest in motivated relations between linguistic form and linguistic meaning (Jakobson 1971, Haiman 1983, Givón 1991, Engberg-Pedersen 1996), this chapter investigates the factors that shape signs like the one in Figure 12.1 and discusses different approaches to their description in the sign linguistics literature.

In a paper on arbitrariness and iconicity in American Sign Language (ASL), Frishberg (1975) introduced the term “classifier” to describe the hands in signs such as ASL MEET, which is made with two index-handshapes (see Appendix) facing each other (see Figure 12.2): “ASL uses the index finger in a vertical orientation as a sort of classifier for human beings” (Frishberg 1975:715). She claims that