Pinky Extension and Eye Gaze: Language Use in Deaf Communities

Grammatical Constraints on Flngerspelled English Verb Loans In BSL

Grammatical Constraints on Flngerspelled English Verb Loans In BSL Rachel Sutton-Spence Fingerspelling is used in many countries in communication among and with the deaf community. It is an important part of sign languages in countries where deaf people receive regular education and are literate. It has been defined as "delivering a rapid sequence of hand-configurations, each corresponding to a letter of the alphabet" (Padden 1991b). In many European sign languages, and in American Sign Language (ASL), the influence of fingerspelling upon a deaf person's signing is frequently evident . However, for various reasons the function of fingerspelling in sign languages has been little researched. Until recently, research on the role that fingerspelling plays within sign languages was very sparse. Sign linguists were, perhaps, more concerned with describing those features of sign languages that were independent of surrounding spoken languages and less concerned with features derived from the spoken languages, such as fingerspelling or the use of spoken language mouth patterns. The most notable exception to this is Battison's ground-breaking work of 1978, which described the processes of the lexicalization of fingerspelling loans in ASL. However, increasing research interest is now centering upon areas of language contact between sign languages and spoken languages. Wilcox (e.g., 1988) and Padden (1991a, 1991b) have both addressed questions concerning fingerspelling in ASL. Research into fingerspelling in British Sign Language has not previously been conducted in any great depth, although Martin Colville conducted some, as yet unpublished, research in this area in the early 1980s. This paper is the result of a larger study into the role of the manual alphabet and fingerspelling in BSL during the 1980s and first part of the 1990S. The British manual alphabet may be seen in Figure 1. This work was financially supported by a student scholarship from the Economic and Social Research Council, grant number R00429024933. 41 - _.. - - --~--.---h ~ I ~ I~ y J~_ \\ --", \ \ \ ( ~====== lB ~ Jr~: z~ (G ~ l( f!f/~: I»~~ Lf~ f G ~ E ~ M~ U~ IF' JfJ~> N~ (:;,; W~ G~ 0;f~ I>~ / ~ ()", H~ ~1§0 x~\ FIGURE 1. The British manual alphabet. The exact status of fingerspelling in British Sign Language is unclear, but its role is clearly complex and varied. The majority of signs in the BSL lexicon have developed naturally within the deaf community.1 They are independent of English orthography and English grammar. The manual alphabet, on the other hand, was originally introduced to deaf people by hearing educators with the express purpose of representing English. Yet, fingerspelling is used for code-switching into English and borrowing from English, and it acts as a resource for new signs in BSL. This paper briefly describes the uses of fingerspelling within BSL but also focuses particularly on the interesting constraints that operate upon fingerspelling loans in BSL, resulting in very few fingerspelled loan verbs. This issue was also raised by Carol Padden (I99Ia), whose research on ASL fingerspelling found that verbs were rarely borrowed from English through fingerspelling. The study of BSL reported here found exactly the same bias against fingerspelled verbs in BSL, and I propose explanations for this phenomenon. BSL borrows from English and from other sign languages; one very common way of introducing new vocabulary into BSL is through fingerspelling . Fingerspelling allows the signer to borrow any English word (and even a word from another language so long as it is written using the same alphabet).2 Because deaf signers are bilingual in BSL and English, they are able to use English loans freely within their signing. Sometimes the fingerspelling loans are only nonce loans (or instances of single word code-switching), but they sometimes become lexicalized and thus become a part of BSL. Where fingerspelling is used in BSL, it may be only a temporary measure to introduce the use of a new concept and may later be dropped from regular use if an accepted sign emerges. For example, when facsimile I. Borrowing refers to linguistic forms being taken over by one language from another (Crystal 1980). Most borrowing produces loan words, although sounds and grammatical structures are also borrowed. When signers fingerspell, they are using English (or another spoken language with a written form) as a source for an item in their sign language, and this may be termed borrowing. It should be noted that borrowing can take place in other ways in sign languages, for example, through loan translation or the...