Features of Stress in American Sign Language

FEATURES OF STRESS IN AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE Vfrginia C Covitgon Spech Stress and Sgn Stress. Because speakers have paralinguistic and kinesic means of supplementing the speech channel and signers have the visual channel alone, it would seem that any one feature such as stress would be more important in American Sign Language (ASL) than in English. Apparently, however, no study has been made of stress in signing, either to analyze its contrastive features or to determine its distribution. This paper will first discuss the six degrees of stress found in ASL and then describe the contrastive features. Some comments will be made about distribution, but more study is needed to find significant patterns. Primary sources for this study are two 400' reels of 16mm film, recordings of two ASL native informants in spontaneous informal conversation made at the Linguistics Research Laboratory, Gallaudet College (1958). Reel A was selected for intensive study at normal, slow, and franeby-frame speeds. Reel A contains more normal utterances, Reel B contains more emphatic ones. The informants, J and V, speak in native ASL, not translating English sentences into signs. Of great help in the study have been Dr. William Stokoe and Mr. James Woodward of the LRL and two of the writer's deaf colleagues, Mrs. Agnes Padden and Mrs. Barbara Stevens. In the examples cited, a sign is represented by its conventional English gloss in Roman type; fingerspelled words are shown in italics; and English translation is given within single quotes. I have shown in a previous paper ( - above) that ASL has four types of juncture which seem to parallel the junctures described in the Trager and Smith Outline of Ehglih Strcture (1951): The functions of the four junctures of ASL closely, though not completely, parallel those of Sign Language Studies 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 of ASL." Lado (1968) distinguishes four basic significant degrees of stress, if zero stress is considered phonemic: 1. primary/'/, the heaviest; 2. secondary /' /, intermediate; 3. weak/>/;and 4. zero /0/. These are assigned to syllables of a word, the first three are "fixed as to position and are described in terms of words and phrases." However, he adds two other degrees: 4. sentence stress, and 5. emphatic stress, which are "movable and describable in terms of sentences and sequences of sentences." He notes that in short sentences, the sentence stress usually falls on the last primary stress. In a series of sentences in which part of the material stays the same, the sentence stress comes on the parts that change. There may be more than one sentence stress. Sentence stress connects parts of sequence and response sentences with previous sentences. Emphatic stress is characterized by much longer and louder pronunciation. Often this stress seems to be sentence stress in an unusual position (Lado 1968:28-31). ASL too appears to have all six degrees of stress. However, except in fingerspelled words, stress would be difficult to isolate in terms of syllables or aspects of a sign. Therefore, each sign will be regarded as a single unit, receiving stress as a whole sign, not broken into the equivalents of syllables. However, it does seem evident that stress is shown mainly in the sig (significant movement) as performed by the dez (distinctive configuration of the designating hand. Stokoe 1960:40-41) of a sign. The tab, (significant location) is much less important, often insignificant in defining stress. ASL necessarily employs more clear stress than does spoken English, since a sign must be perceptible to the observer; however, instances of zero stress in ASL are here defined: 1. Zero Stress/l/. A sign or a fingerspelled letter with zero stress is totally missed by the non-native observer until detected on a frame-by-frame Covington analysis, and then often only with the aid of a written transcript. E.g. in the fingerspelled word when, the signer seems to spell w h n, with no discernible representation of the e. Frame-by-frame examination shows...