Is Sign Language a language? This presentation was made for my psycholinguistics class at Unindra in 2015.

1. Natural Sign Languages
Aditya Putri
Aditya Wardhana
Eka Rambe
Hery Yanti
Laila Qodariah
Zainah
Lyanthinova Gloria

3. Sign language
A language used by many
hearing impaired people
and by some who
communicate with
hearing impaired people,
which makes use of
movements of the hands,
arms, body, head, face,
eyes, and mouth to
communicate meanings.

4. Phonology
Formational Elements
Combining Formational Elements
Prosody
In order to have sentences, one must have words, and
words pronounced as a series of sounds.
What about sign languages?

5. Formational
Elements:
the list of hand
shapes, locations and
movements
They are
comparable to the
list of consonants
and vowels in
spoken language.

6. Combining Formational Elements
A sequence of two hand shapes is prohibited
in the native sign of ASL and other sign languages
Assimilation process:
• greenback and beanbag
The nasal sound [n] often assimilates the labial
place of articulation from the [b] that follows it:
gree(m)back, bea(m)bag.
• oversleep made from two words sleep and
sunrise

7. The word OVERSLEEP
made from the two words
SLEEP and SUNRISE.
The ASL compound the
hand configuration of
SLEEP borrows a feature
from the following sign
SUNRISE.

8. Prosody:
a collective term for variations in loudness,
pitch and speech rhythm.
Sign languages
employ facial
expressions, body
postures and rhythmic
devices in similar way
and for similar
functions.

9. Morphology
Word Formation
Verb Agreement
Classified
Construction

10. Word Formation
Vocabulary of sign languages is purely iconic: there
is one-to-one relationship between the form of a
word or concept and its meaning.
The ASL sign for airplane looks something like an
airplane; the sign for give looks something like the
act of handing something to someone.

11. Verb Agreement
Sign language verbs agree in
person and in number with their
subject and object.
Time-Subject-Verb-Object or
Time-Subject-Verb for word
order. That is, when discussing
past and future events a time-
frame is established before the
rest of the sentence, for example:
WEEK-PAST I WASH MY CAR.
The active voice is in Subject-
Verb-Object word order:
BOY THROW BALL.
The passive voice is in
Object, Subject-Verb word
order: BALL BOY THROW.

12. Classifier Constructions
Classifiers are signs that use hand shapes
that are associated with specific categories
(classes) of size, shape, or usage.

13. Syntax
Recursion
Word Order
Sign Language and Universal Grammar

14. Recursion
we can put sentences inside other sentences and these
can be
Generated inside sentences.
Examples:
Mary helped George.
Cathy knew that Mary helped George.
John believed that Cathy knew that Mary helped George
.
In English, recursion is often used to create expressions
that modify or change the meaning of one of the element
s of the sentence. For example, to take the word nails a
nd give it a more specific meaning, we could use an obje
ct relative clause such as that Dan bought, as in
Hand me the nails that Dan bought.

15. Word Order

17. Sign Language and Universal Grammar

20. Language as an Art Form:
Sign Language Poetry
The fact that poetry arises in deaf community teaches us:
the desire and ability to mold the formational elements of
language into an artistic expression of its content is a
hallmark of human culture.
Wim Emmerik

21. Sign language
poets use:
reiterative use of hand shape
basic hand
shape with
extended index
finger
sound is unnecessary,
not only for communicative use of language
but for artistic use of language as well.

22. Summing Up
Sign languages are full linguistic systems that share
with spoken languages defining characteristics of
human language.
Sign languages use hand shape, location and movement
that can be combined to create meaningful
morphemes and words
Like spoken languages, sign languages
have the power to express the full
range of human experience, including
poetry.