Theme, Rheme, Topic, and Comment in the Syntax of American Sign Language

SLS 20 (1978), 193-218 0 Linstok Press, Inc. THEME, RHEME, TOPIC, AND COMMENT IN THE SYNTAX OF AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE Robert M. Ingram A look at syntax For centuries it was generally assumed in sign. that sign languages of the deaf had no syntax. Linguistic research has effectively laid this misapprehension to rest, but some skeptics, reluctant to see the writing on the wall, have resorted to contending that "it cannot be too difficult to look at syntax in sign" (a comment attributed to Ira Hirsch, in Kavanagh & Cutting, 1975:245) and so implying either that the syntax of a given sign language is the same as the syntax of a spoken language for which the signs are assumed to be surrogates, or that sign syntax is extremely simple and perhaps universal. There do exist artificial or contrived sign systems developed to follow the syntax and sometimes the morphological patterns of various spoken languages, but there are also natural sign languages that are quite distinct from spoken languages in origin and structure. Such a natural sign language is American Sign Language (ASL), which-contrary to Hirsch's rather limited perception (op.cit., 1975:318)-is much more widely used by deaf persons in the United States than are the various contrived sign systems. 1 A revision of a paper presented at the Sign Language Symposium, MIT, April 1978. The author thanks Nancy Chinchor, Roberta Kevelson, Henry Kucera, Cathy Scarborough, Thomas Winter,and especially Frangois Grosjean, Harlan Lane, and the Department of Psychology, Northeastern University for opportunity to use their Goldilocks tapes. Sign Language Studies 20 The syntax of ASL has never been adequately described, partly because a syntactic description has had to wait for more detailed analysis of the lexical units, or signs, of the language and partly because the various approaches to the study of syntax of spoken languages have seemed inadequate to capture certain features of a language that is gesturally produced and visually perceived. Stokoe (1972) reviews seven such theoretical approaches: traditional, structural, tagmemic, stratificational, correlational, generative (including McCall's 1965 grammar), and operational; and finds them all lacking in one respect or another. A technique known as frame analysis (Kegl & Chinchor 1975) may hold some potential for exploring the syntax of ASL, but further examination of this recently proposed technique will be needed. A complete grammar of ASL, once developed, will have to account for the capacity of the language to express information simultaneously, as opposed to the sequential nature of spoken languages (cf Bellugi & Fischer 1972). The grammar will also have to capture the manner in which ASL uses three dimensional space to express grammatical relationships (Friedman 1975), and the capacity of certain ASL verbs to move through space to establish or modify those relationships or to do both (Fischer & Gough 1978). In short, a grammar of ASL will have to be quite different from the grammars that are currently employed to describe spoken languages, and it may well be that explorations in the syntax of ASL will challenge our conceptions of what grammars of spoken languages should be (see comments by Klima, Stokoe, and Fodor in Kavanagh & Cutting 1975:244f). "One point is clear," says Stokoe (1972:119). "Approaches to a description of ASL syntax must begin from that language." This admonition means that the linguist must describe ASL as he finds it and not as he presumes it must be in order to fit the mold of grammars of spoken languages. We have now reached the point in sign language research where it is no longer necessary-or even desirable-to describe sign languages in terms of spoken languages. Pauses & syntax in ASL. Grosjean and Lane (1977: 115) have argued that "the analysis of sign language pause structure can serve as a guide in assigning structural descriptions to sign sentences ." In other words, by identifying and measuring the Ingram pauses in signed utterances, one can determine the location of major and minor constituent boundaries, and from these data, together with other linguistic data, posit linguistic descriptions of those utterances. Pause analysis has been used effectively to determine the surface structure of spoken utterances (Brown & Miron 1971, F. Grosjean 1972, F. Grosjean & Deschamps 1975, L...