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

5. Syntactic Variation

41 5 Syntactic Variation In the variation section, we noted that variation can occur not only in the parts of signs but also in the arrangement of word-sized units. When the parts of sentences can vary, then, we are seeing syntactic variation. To analyze this we looked at stories that the participants told during the free conversation. Often when people are chatting, one person will tell others a story related to the topic they are discussing; some of these stories are relatively long, while others are short. Stories are good to analyze because it is easy to see where they begin and end. We looked at stories from all seven regions, from men and women, from middle-class and workingclass signers, and from African American and Caucasian signers. ! Clip 8. The concepts discussed here are also covered in the Syntactic Variation section of the CD. Specific examples in this clip are repeated in other clips refered to in this chapter. ! ASL has different kinds of verbs. In some verbs, such as GIVE and TEASE, the location and the palm orientation tell who the first person (“I”) is and who the second (“you”) or third (“he” or “she”) person is. For example, in the sentence PRO.1 GIVE PRO.2 (“I give you”), the hand moves from near the signer’s body to the space in front of the signer. In the sentence PRO.2 GIVE PRO.1 (“You give me”), the hand moves in toward the signer. Even though signers sometimes sign separate signs for PRO.1 and PRO.2, verbs such as GIVE and TEASE, called indicating verbs do not require these separate signs.6 But other verbs, such as THINK, FEEL, and KNOW, do not have anything in their orientation or location that indicates first, second , or third person. These plain verbs require signers to produce separate signs for the subject and object, as in PRO.1 THINK (“I think”).7 But these verbs often occur without a sign for first, second, or third person, and we wanted to understand why. ! Clip 9. In the video example we see three examples of sentences with pronouns: (1) The older man signs #DR #BRILL (PRO.2) KNOW PRO.3 (“him”)? The parentheses around PRO.2 indicate that he does not actually sign PRO.2 (“you”); (2) the man is quoting a woman and signs (PRO.1) FEEL NERVOUS. Again, the parentheses indicate that he does not actually produce the sign PRO.1 (“I”); (3) the man in the middle signs (PRO.1) HAVE SON NOW, (PRO.1) HAVE SON. He does not actually sign PRO.1. ! In the stories, we looked at each sentence that had a plain verb and noted whether it had a pronoun subject. We also noted some other things about each sentence: 1. Same or switch reference: In the two sentences “I just stood there. I was quiet,” the pronouns refer to the same person; this is called “same reference.” But in the two sentences “He just stood there. I was quiet,” the reference switches from “he” in the first sentence to “I” in the second. We expected the pronouns to be left out more in samereference situations. 2. Person and number: We noted whether the reference was to first-person singular (“I”), second-person singular (“you”), third-person singular (he” or “she”), first-person plural (“we”), and second- or thirdperson plural (“you” or “they”). 42 Chapter 5 43 Syntactic Variation 3. Sentence type: We noted what kind of sentence it was—declarative, yes/no question, wh-question, and so forth. 4. Constructed dialogue and constructed action: This is what people commonly know as “taking a role,” and it happens very often in ASL conversations. Signers show what someone else signed or what they did. We noted whether the sentence was part of constructed dialogue or action. 5. English influence: Signers often use signs and structures that show the influence of spoken or written English. For example, one participant signed LIZARD I-S #BACK HOME, fingerspelling the English word “is.” Another participant signed ANYWAY PRO.1PL GET HOME (“Anyway, we got home”), using the English construction “to get home.” We noted whether the sentence showed this kind of influence from English. We analyzed 429 sentences from nineteen different stories. We include one of the stories here, told by a teacher in Kansas, which describes the reactions of students and the teacher in an...