Juncture in American Sign Language

JUNCTURE IN AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE' Vissinia C Corikgeton An oral system of communication such as spoken English can be analyzed into significant units of sound called segmental phonemes. Closely cooperating with these segmentals are the siqprusementals: stress, pitch, and juncture. Other features, such as eye contact, facial expression, bodily movement, and gesture, are considered kinesic and therefore outside the scope of linguistic analysis. A visual system of communication such as the sign language of the American deaf iscomposed of gestures. not sounds. In one sense the whole language might seem to be kinesic. But American Sign Language (ASL) is "asystem with levels corresponding to phonological, morphological, and semological organization" (Stokoe 1960). At the level analogous to phonemics, Stokoe calls the significant units cheremes fkiri'rmz/ and their subclasses, edlohers(1960:30). ASL utterances contain morphemes derived from two separate cheremic systems: fingerspelling and signs. In a fingerspelled morpheme, the cheremes are digital symbols for the letters of the English alphabet, the allochers are the inexhaustible individual variations in forming these symbols. As Stokoe has pointed out, fingerspelling isactually a secondary graphemic system, a way of visually representing English words. Therefore, fingerspelling is based on the principles of phonemics underlying English, not on a separate system. However, a sign morpheme is a composition of gestural elements which represents a whole English word, such as 'know', or phrase, such as 'don't know'. Its significant features, or cheremes, are configuration. his paper witten in 1964 and rethed to inStokoe et al. 1%S:27S has been ratisnd ftrpublication here. Sign Language Studies position or location, and motion. For example, the configuration of 'know' is one 'B' hand (flat, open), palm in, slightly bent. The position is the forehead. The motion is to touch the tips of the fingers to the forehead. These aspects of the sign "appear to have the same order of priority and importance as the segmental phonemes of speech" (Stokoe 1960:40). Sign language utterances, then, consist of morphemes: fingerspelled words and signs which can be analyzed cheremically. But such an analysis reveals the operation of other features, apart from the basic aspects. For example, the sign 'remember' may mean either 'I remember' or 'Do you remember?'. The intended meaning is made clear not by the sign itself, but by factors of eye contact, facial expression, and terminal movement accompanying the sign. Thus "It seems likely that behavior of the kind classified as kinesic when it accompanies speech (Trager 1958), may have a more central function in a visual language. That is, the same activity which is kinesic with respect to American English may actually be suprasegmental , or metaspectual,in sign language" (Stokoe 1960:40). One suprasegmental feature of English is juncture. As this paper will show, juncture also operates in ASL and in a similar way. This analysis of juncture in ASL is based on the writer's personal contact with deaf students, faculty, and staff (including Stokoe) of Gallaudet College and on examination of motion pictures of deaf informants made for linguistic research at Gallaudet College, 1957-1959. Several motion pictures of spontaneous, informal conversations between adult deaf informants were first studied. Then two reels (400 feet) were selected for intensive analysis at normal and slow speeds. The informants were two Gallaudet College students. The system of notation for signs, based on cheremic analysis (Stokoe 1960) will not be used in this paper. Instead a sign is transcribed here as the word that it conventionally translates in Roman type. Fingerspelled words are underlined.Translations are at the right within single quotes. American sign language has four types of juncture which seem to parallel the junctures in English described by George L. Trager and Henry Lee Smith, Jr. (1957): internal open juncture, 'plus' /+/, and the three Covington terminal junctures or 'terminals': single-bar, 'sustain' /1/, double-bar, 'rise' /11/, and double-cross, 'fall' /#/. The functions of the four junctures of ASL closely, though not completely, parallel those of the four junctures of English. The internal open juncture indicates the boundaries of signs and fingerspelled words. The terminals indicate the boundaries of clauses, sentences, and longer stretches of signs. Therefore, the same symbols may be used in written transcriptions...