Signs of Tense in ASL Verbs

SIGNS OF TENSE IN ASL VERBS E.Lynn Jacobowitz William C.Stokoe Teose &time Verbs in American Sign Language (ASL) have been described in the past, by the second author and others, as not regularly inflected for tense. If this were true, ASL would resemble a great many languages of the world but would differ sharply from English and the other Indo-European languages, including all the commonly taught foreign languages" of the American educational system. There is, however, sufficient variation among the world's languages to make useful a closer look at what is meant by tense and idllection. Verb tense is very loosely defined and understood in American popular thinking. Ask the students in any college classroom how many tenses there are and the answer will surely be, "Three: past, present, and future." But these three have little to do directly with the linguistic system called tense;instead they belong to a notion of how time divides that is widely shared in Western cultures. In courses specifically for language study, students and teachers may define tense equally loosely. Many aver that wR/go is "the future tense" of the English verb go,that go, the citation form in dictionaries, is "the present tense,' and that went is "the past tense." The application of logic, however, reveals that of these forms only went is a genuine tense if tense is defined strictly: Tense is a verb inflection that invariably specifies time. The citation form go is uninflected and so cannot qualify as a tense under this definition. Go also serves speakers of English for timeless predicates (e.g. The planets go around the sun), for indicating future time when used after wilf, and when used by itself (e.g. The team goes to Penn next Friday). The form goes is inflected, certainly, but the inflection indicates that the subject of goes is marked for gender (i.e. the subject when referred to o 1988 by Linstok Press, Inc. 331 ISSN 0302-1475 See note Inside front cover. Tense inASL verbs requires the pronouns she,he,or it, and not I you, or they). The verb phrase wilgo has no tense marking according to the strict definition of tense above; both will and go are uninflected. Speakers of English use willgo (in Britain shallgo also) to mean future action will occur, or to mean that someone or something has 'determined' on action. The prhasewouldgo does have the past-tense-marked auxiliary, would but wouldgo may actually point to a possible future action; among users of standard dialects of English it means, instead of past, that the going depends on some condition specified in the immediate context. (In English-based creoles and other non-standard English dialects the uninflected be may serve as the auxiliary for future meaning.) Americans who study foreign languages in school are familiar with verb paradigms that have slots with the English labels present, past, pastimperfect, future,perfect,pastperfect, futureperfect, etc. These labels indiscriminately mix time designations with reference to the state of averb's action, completed or not complete or in process. Textbooks fill in these slots -- correctly when they use single verb forms (i.e. forms genuinely inflected for tense), but more often incorrectly, according to a strict definition of tense, with phrases of the aux * v kind. The textbook authors give the foreign language verb or verb phrase the label of that slot and translate the example into English. But the English phrase that translates the meaning as closely as possible is a translation and not a tense; English regular verbs have only the -d as the past tense inflection; other time meanings are conveyed in English by phrases using auxiliaries. Time &tense i Minimal acquaintance with another language does sign language not often lead the English-speaking student to fluent conversational ability but it has led the ignorant to describe a sign language of deaf people as "a means of communication without grammar." It has sometimes also led them to suppose that because sign language verbs seem to be uninflected for tense they have no other inflectional system, and into stating that the language of signers is deficient in what it takes to make a...