Inter-Rule Implication in American Sign Language

INTER-RULE IMPLICATION IN AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE' James C. Woodward,Jr. 1.0 Introduction. Recent studies of sign language in the United States (Stokoe 1970, 1972; Moores 1972; Woodward 1972, 1973; Friedman 1973) posit a diglossic continuum and give support of several kinds to the hypothesis that there is such a continuum between American Sign Language (ASL) and Standard English in the U.S. deaf community (as described by Meadow, 1972, and Schlesinger and Meadow, 1973). Variationists, Bailey (1971), Fasold (1972), Bickerton (1972), and De Camp (1972), have pointed out that variation in language includes a large part of language competence, since much of what has been termed free variation is predictable by extralinguistic factors, and that variation theory can incorporate "dialect" variation more easily than can the traditional core-and-appendage grammars. The variationists have offered two basic approaches to the study of variation: variable rules, and implicational analysis. Variable rules will not be discussed here, because this paper is not primarily concerned with variable rules in ASL and because there are good treatments of variable rules in Labov (1969), Fasold (1970), nd Wolfram (1972). However it will be useful to have here a brief review of implicational analysis to help in understanding what follows in this paper. Stolz and Bills (1968) and DeCamp (1968) both proposed early implicational models for the handling of variation in language. In such an implicational model, given a set of features, A, B, C, D, these IResearch on which this paper is based was supported in part by National Science Foundation grant GS-31349 and National Institutes of Health Grant NS-10302. Sign Language Studies may be arranged in such an order that A D B D C D D. This means that if a lect has feature A, it will also have B, C, and D; if it does not have A but has B, it will have C and D; and so on. (Some linguists, e.g. Bailey, 1971, have proposed the use of the term lect instead of dialect because a real dialect, i.e. a speech community bounded by isogloss bundles, is rarely found.) For a set of four features there are 16 possible lectal arrangements (24). However, most features and rules seem to be implicationally ordered, and so according to the logic of the implicational model, there can be only five lects (4 + 1; or ABCD, BCD, CD, D, and none of these). Languages tend not to have the mathematically possible number of lects; languages do tend to have lects that can be described in terms of the implicational model. The mathematical (possible) and the implicational arrays of lects with four hypothetical features are shown in Tables 1and 2: A B C D 1 + + + + A B C D - + + 2 + + ± 3 + + 4 + + - + - + - + - + - - - - +4 + 5 + - + ± 6 + 7 + - +± -- + -- +± -- + 8 + - - Table 1. Mathematicallypossiblearrangement offour features (+, presence;-, absence) in lects. Woodward A B C D 1 + + + + 2 - + + + 3 -+ + 4 - - 5 - - - Table 2. Lects possible with fourfeatures in implicationalorder. 2.0 Analysis. Elsewhere I have shown (Woodward 1973) that variation in the use of three rules of ASL grammar could be described by implicational analysis, that the variation was conditioned by ASL cherological (mutatis mutandis, "phonological") features, and that rules with weighted semantic and cherological features could be written to describe this variation. I called these rules, Negative Incorporation,Agent-Beneficiary Directionality , and Verb Reduplication. 2.1 Rule-to-Rule-Implication. The data (in Woodward 1973) revealed six lects for Negative Incorporation, ten lects for Agent-Beneficiary Directionality , and ten lects for Verb Reduplication. In the same study it was pointed out that the implicational scales could be divided and that Negative Incorporation lects 1-3, Agent-Beneficiary lects 1-5, and Verb Reduplication lects 1-5 were the part of the continuum that approached ASL most closely, i.e. were the lects that used these three rules in the largest number of environments. These three rules then may be treated as features in another implicational ordering. Table 3 shows the three lects so determined with '+' indicating membership in the ASL-like lects and '-', membership in lects 4-6, 6-10, and 6-10, i.e. the more English-like lects. Sign Language Studies...