Frequency of Occurrence and Ease of Articulation of Sign Language Handshapes: The Taiwanese Example

Conclusion

Conclusion This book explores the connection between ease of articulation and frequency of occurrence of handshapes in Taiwan Sign Language (TSL). Its central conclusion, based on what the evidence suggests, is that, although ease of articulation does not dictate frequency of occurrence, it plays a significant role in helping to explain which handshapes are used most frequently in TSL. The book focuses in depth on the cmcial steps that were taken to reach this conclusion: (a) proposing an independently motivated theory of ease of articulation based on the physiology of the hand, (b) detennining both the type frequencies and the token frequencies of TSL handshapes, and (c) analyzing and comparing the results of both investigations. This work makes conttibutions in three areas. First, this work contributes to a better understanding of sign languages in general. Compared with what is known about spoken languages, very little is known about sign languages, and even less is known about sign languages in use outside North America and Europe. Perhaps the most central contribution of this work, then, is that it adds to what is known about one of the sign languages we know the least about. Second, this book makes a contribution with respect to the examination of frequency. Clearly, exploration by linguists and others of frequency effects in spoken languages is worthwhile. (As Morford and MacFarlane, 2003, point out, psycholinguistic studies that do not control for frequency ofthe words being tested simply cannot be published.) That exploration also is expected, therefore, to be as worthwhile to researchers who examine the structure of sign languages. As Wilbur (1999a) 182 Conclusion notes, what we find depends partly on where we look. Studying corpora ofvarious sign languages could yield heretofore unavailable results that would help a great deal in understanding the structure of sign languages . Although this work examines type and token frequency effects only insofar as they relate to ease of articulation, the expectation is that these effects occur in other languages as they occur in TSL. Future work will confirm whether these predictions are borne out. Very few works except for those Tcite in chapter 1 establish a natural sign language corpus and explain generalizations made from examination of the corpus. With respect to the data itself, the TSL corpus I have used is as yet, of course, too small. This limitation cannot be avoided now, but this book will likely spark interest and inspire mobilization of resources to establish a much larger corpus of TSL. The process of data analysis involved transcribing TSL conversations and then translating them from TSL to Chinese and English glosses. The English transcriptions were then analyzed, using Smith and Ting's (1979, 1984) sign language manuals, to see what handshapes occur in a given sign in isolation. This process may not be the best way to accomplish this task because the videotaped data cannot be used directly. But as technology to do this sort of work improves, better procedures will be established. This study serves to encourage future research. Third, this book explores an under-studied aspect ofTSL: its phonetics . Unfortunately, linguistic phenomena that fall under the phonetic domain are sometimes characterized as unimportant. I have explained that, in spoken language research, this lack of interest results in some phonologists cultivating a particular disregard for phonetics, although this situation is changing in many parts of the field. In sign language research, this disregard has manifested somewhat differently: phonetics and phonology are, in some sense, not separated ideologically because phonetics, per se, has not received much attention to begin with. This book takes a step in the right direction by considering how handshapes, specifically those that show up in the inventory ofTSL, are produced. It is not concerned with the phonological processes that members of the inventory may undergo. It does not examine the behavior of handshapes, Conclusion 183 for example, in strings or in individual signs. It does not propose any rules that relate one fOlln of a handshape to another. It does not discuss handshape variants. Thus, I consider it an example of phonetic research. Using a phonetic approach, this book explores the idea of articulation and claims that we can establish which handshapes are more effortful to produce. Perhaps the central problem with ease of articulation is that it is not often used in a rigorous manner.rMy work provides a testable, explicit model of ease of articulation of handshapes. This model allows...