Movement and Rhythm in Nursery Rhymes in LSF

Rhythm in Sign Poetry: Previous Studies

One of the first studies dealing with poetry in sign languages (Klima and Bellugi 1976), ¹ dates from the first flowering of research into signed languages, a decade and a half after Stokoe’s (1960) seminal study. Klima and Bellugi examine characteristics of what they term “heightened uses of language” in American Sign Language (ASL): plays on words and art forms and, more specifically, the sign counterpart of oral and written poetry, which they call “art-sign.” ² Among the various features of poetic structure they examine, they pay particular attention to the formal structure of signs and to the way their arrangement deviates from ordinary signing. Of their observations, the ones that particularly interest us are those concerning rhythm.

Smoothing of Transitions

In order to create and maintain “a flow of movement between signs,” according to Klima and Bellugi (59), the signer imposes “distortions . . . on the form of the signs themselves, . . . but also (manipulates) transitions between signs” (65). Signers may select signs with the same handshape or modify the handshape of one sign so that consecutive signs have similar handshapes. Furthermore, they may see to it that the initial position of a sign is the same as the final position of the previous sign so that the transitional movement reduces or even disappears. While manipulations that consist of changes to the order of signs have counterparts in the oral modality, those that involve distortions to the form of signs and the reduction of transitions between signs have no clear analogue in spoken language poetry. In rhythmic terms, signs are chosen partly in accordance with phonological criteria. Moreover, some of these modifications, such as change of handshape, may affect the phonological structure of signs when meaning is added or modified as a consequence of the change in form. ³ Finally, some of the transformations violate rules governing phonological well-formedness in signs. ⁴ In many cases, if a poetic version of a sign were replaced with an “everyday signing” version, the lexical and propositional meaning would not change, but the overall feeling and perception of the poem, that is to say, a less concrete kind of meaning, one more metaphorical in nature, would. The fact that such changes do not affect the lexical meaning of signs, coupled with the fact that they are unlike other, regularly observed phonological processes, leads us to conclude that the kinds of changes in form observed in poetic signing should not be interpreted simply as phonological distortions. Rather, these changes should be interpreted as a merging of (certain features of) the signs’ form with other iconically or metaphorically motivated elements of form whose meaning is not ultimately lexical. Many of these changes in form are due to linguistic (i.e., phonological) structure being combined with mimelike gesture and a superimposed spatial and/or rhythmic structure, the product being a heightened use of language. In many cases, such changes could be profitably treated as analogous to the types of changes found in music, where the regular rhythmic structure, pitch, and intonational contours of words and phrases are routinely distorted to fit in with the musical structure of the superimposed melody, whose form often metaphorically evokes meaning of a kind that goes beyond that of the lyrics alone.

Rhythmic Pattern

Manipulations of the structure of signs discussed above cooccur in some of the poems examined by Klima and Bellugi with a superimposed “kinetic” and “rhythmic superstructure.” The kinetic superstructure corresponds to “an enlarged pattern of movement” (68) and the rhythmic superstructure to a rhythmic pattern based on accents, length of signs, and variations in speed and pausing. Both are compared by the authors to the melodic structure of songs in spoken languages, but it is worth noting that each of these processes is mentioned only in connection with one or the other of the signers (Bragg for kinetic superstructure...