GESTURES AND SIGN LANGUAGE

GESTURES

- Gestures differ from signs in the fact that gestures accompany the communicative act, such as
shoving your hand downwards while talking of falling grades, while signs are the communicative act
in itself.

- Emblems are not gestures, but rather fixed phrases that consist of a symbolic signal. Thumbs-up for
example is ‘all good’, one should be careful of the social world one is moving in though, because in
some African countries, thumbs-up also means ‘I’ll shove this up your ass’.

TYPES OF GESTURES

- Iconics are gestures that mirror the meaning of what is said. Such as tracing a square when saying
that one is looking for a box. Gestures like this can also add meaning, such as swinging an arm up and
down as if it held a weapon, in accompaniment with the phrase ‘She chased him off’.

- Deictic gestures are gestures that point to something to complement speech. E.g. pointing at a cake
while asking if the other person wants some.

- Beats are small and quick movements of the hands/fingers used to accompany words, usually for
the purpose of emphasis or to show the rhythm of talk.

TYPES OF SIGN LANGUAGE

- Alternate sign language is a set of gestures developed by speakers for limited communication when
speech is not possible. Special operations, religious orders, book-makers.

- Primary sign language is the first language of a group of people that do not use spoken language to
communicate. Such as deaf people. There are different sign languages in different countries, there is
no universal one.

ORALISM

- ASL wasn’t really considered as a serious language until the 1960’s. Before that children were
taught oral exercises and lip-reading in an attempt to teach them speech. Lollll. This of course failed
miserably (only 10% of students could speak comprehensibly and only 4% could lip-read), but was
not challenged for a hundred years.

- Kids who didn’t have parents who could teach them ASL learned it from other children at deaf
schools. Interestingly enough this makes ASL one of the few languages taught and transmitted by
children.

SIGNED ENGLISH

- is a system that encodes normative English into signs. Educators still hang on to the wish to teach
deaf children English, written and signed form. However, this system is used primarily to facilitate
communication between deaf and non-deaf people. (Only 10% of deaf children have deaf parents.) It
is easier for teachers to make signed English signs as they speak rather than ASL, since the two
languages don’t have much in common. (ASL came from France). Signed English however, takes
about twice as long to produce a sentence than the same sentence in ASL or spoken English. Due to
this what usually sees use is a hybrid-form of the two. However, since ASL comes from French, using
the signed English structure with ASL words is like using German structure but with Russian words. It
is argued that teaching English structure facilitates learning to read the language.

ORIGINS OF ASL
- It came from France, from a Paris school. In the early 19th century a teacher, Laurent Clerc, was
brought to America by an American minister who was trying to establish a deaf school. This imported
version of French sign language mixed with the grassroots vocabulary of the then American sign
language, to create ASL as we know it today. This is also why BSL and ASL are not the same.

THE STRUCTURE OF SIGNS

- ASL has four articulatory parameters: Shape, orientation, location and movement

SHAPE AND ORIENTATION

- Shape is the configuration of the hand. E.g. flat-hand. The orientation of the hand is palm up, rather
than palm down.

LOCATION AND MOVEMENT

- Location in relation to the head and upper-body of the signer. Movement, is where the hand/-s
move after beginning in the initial location. There is also a difference of meaning between fast and
slow movement. It’s just as variable as any language.

PRIMES, FACES AND FINGER-SPELLING

- These articulatory parameters can be divided into sets of features or primes. Like for example, flat-
hand being a prime of shape. We can thus analyse sign-language for ‘phonological features’ just as
any other language.

-In addition to this, what’s also important is facial expression and head/-eye-movement

- Finger spelling is a method of using the alphabet with one’s fingers.

- An interesting distinction, says the book at least, is that spoken language is linear, while sign
language is multi-linear seeing as it can produce more information while the hands are signing.

Note from Bor: I don’t agree. Intonation, facial expressions and gestures also make spoken language
multi-dimensional. Both languages are equally complex.

THE MEANING OF SIGNS

- Signs are not advanced pantomime as some non-signers think. It’s just as arbitrary as real language.

REPRESENTING SIGNS

- Read the fucking book p. 191

ASL AS A NATURAL LANGUAGE

- Any feature characteristically found in spoken language is found reflected in sign language.

- There is morphology, there is syntax, there is phonology, children go through developmental

phases, there are jokes, dialects and I imagine even accents.

STUDY QUESTIONS

1. Emblems are fixed phrases that consist of symbolic signals. Thumbs-up for all good.

2. Iconics are used to mirror the meaning or add to it of what is being said, such as a square being a
box, while deictics are used to point at something.

3. Alternate sign language is a set of gestures used by spoken-language users when they cannot
speak. Like religious silence times.

4. ASL is its own language while signed English is simply a system that encodes spoken English into
signs.

5. The articulatory parameters that have flat-hand and palm up as primes are respectively shape and
orientation.

6. /

RESEARCH TASKS

A. The connection between the invention the telephone and deaf education is that deaf people were
kinda fucked and excluded from using the machine until SMS was invented.

B. People had such a strong commitment to oralism because they considered it the duty of the
anormal to conform to the normal and because they didn’t want to admit they were wrong.

C. SimCom is simultaneous communication, where someone is for example speaking English while
using signed English at the same time. It allows hearing teachers to communicate with their students,
however, the children would probably be better off just learning in ASL.

D. ‘Prelinguistic’ hearing impairment is when someone loses their ability to utilise speech before
having learning, while ‘postlinguistic’ is the opposite. Prelinguistic is young people, while
postlinguistic is mostly old people getting on in their age.