What's Your Sign for Pizza?: An Introduction to Variation in American Sign Language

6. Lexical Variation

46 6 Lexical Variation As we mentioned earlier, we selected two people from each group and showed them a set of thirty-four pictures and fingerspelled words to see which signs they would produce for the objects and actions shown. We chose the stimuli based on earlier work on variation in ASL and also included some that reflect recent changes in technology and country names (see Figure 14).8 Before we talk about what we found, we need to talk a little bit more about two kinds of lexical variation. One has to do with signs for a concept that are completely different from one another, signs that share no formal characteristics. We see this in the various signs for PIZZA: Some variants are fingerspelled, while others are representative of a person taking a bite out of a piece of pizza or of the round plate on which pizza is served. These separate variants do not share handshapes, locations, palm orientation, or movement. They can be seen in Figure 15. ! Clip 10. The concepts discussed here are also covered in the Lexical Variation section of the CD. Specific examples in this clip are repeated in other clips referred to in this chapter. ! Another kind of lexical variation occurs when a concept may be represented by a number of signs that are all clearly related in some way. Figure 16, which shows different signs for BANANA, illustrates this. We see that the base hand is a 1 handshape and that the active hand moves down AFRICA COMPUTER MICROWAVE SANDWICH ARREST DEER MITTENS SNOW BANANA DELICIOUS PANTS (men’s) SOON CAKE DOG PANTS (women’s) SQUIRREL CANDY EARLY PERFUME STEAL CEREAL FAINT PIZZA THIEF CHEAT FEAR RABBIT TOMATO CHERRIES GLOVES RELAY CHICKEN JAPAN RUN Figure 14. The thirty-four stimuli Figure 15. Lexical variants of PIZZA Figure 16. Lexical variants of BANANA the sides of the base hand with a variety of different handshapes: F, A, 1, X, G, or V. These are phonologically related variants. ! Clip 11. The CD shows a group from Maryland producing different forms of BANANA, while groups from Kansas and Boston show different forms of PIZZA. ! We wanted to see how many separate variants and how many phonologically related variants there were for each of our stimuli. Figure 17 presents the stimuli again. The number next to each one represents the number of separate variants we found for each sign, including both phonological variants (different versions of the same sign) and different signs. This shows that some signs have many separate variants whereas others have only a few. Participants produced only two separate signs for SNOW: One was a combination of the signs WHITE and SNOW (fingers in a 5 handshape, palm down, wiggling as they move down), sometimes produced without WHITE; in the other, the participants fingerspelled #SNOW and then signed it. EARLY had the most variants, thirteen, including an open 8 handshape moving across the back of the base hand, a 3 handshape on the forehead, as in ROOSTER, a two-handed sign with L handshapes moving out from the chest, and so on. And we saw the variants of PIZZA and BANANA shown in Figures 15 and 16. ! Clip 12. The narrator shows different forms for EARLY and SNOW. ! In all of these variants we noticed some very interesting things. One was that even though some of the signs had a lot of variants, for 27 of the 34 stimuli, one variant was shared across all of the seven regions. That 49 Lexical Variation means that 79 percent of the signs have a shared variant across all of the sites. As part of the research for the project we looked at the history of the residential schools for deaf students at each of the seven sites. We found that the schools were commonly founded either by graduates of the American School for the Deaf (ASD) in Hartford, Connecticut, which was the first school for deaf students in America and was founded by Thomas Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc, or by graduates of other schools who were themselves educated by ASD graduates or instructors. Figure 18 illustrates what we found: a steady progression of ASL users from Hartford, Connecticut, all the way to Washington state. So it is not at all surprising to find some signs shared by all of the signers...