This paper reports on a comparison of word order issues, and more specifically on the order of the verb and its arguments, in two unrelated sign languages: South African Sign Language and Flemish Sign Language. The study comprises the first part of a larger project in which a number of grammatical mechanisms and structures are compared across the two sign languages, using a corpus consisting of similar VGT and SASL-data of a various nature. The overall goal of the project is to contribute to a further understanding of the issue of the degree of similarity across unrelated sign languages. However, the different studies also mean a further exploration of the grammars of the two languages involved. In this paper the focus is on the analysis of isolated declarative sentences elicited by means of pictures. The results yield some interesting similarities across all signers but also indicate that — especially with regard to constituent order — there are important differences between the two languages.
In this article we discuss the signed language used by the Deaf community in South Africa, and examine the historical conditions for its emergence. We describe the legal and actual situation of South Afiican Sign Language in South Africa today, particularly in relation to schooling. We investigate the different factors that underlie the claims that there is more than one sign language in South Africa, and we spell out the practical consequences of accepting these claims without further examination.We assume without argument that Deaf people in South Africa, far from being deficient, or disabled, are a linguistic minority, with their own language, South African Sign Language, and their own culture, South African Deaf culture 2 . Like everyone else in this post-modernist world, Deaf people have differential membership in many different cultures, on the basis of, for instance, religion, life-style, daily practices, political beliefs, and education. However, what they all have in common is membership in a community that uses signed language, and that socialises with other people who do the same 3 . Thus, the model we adopt is non-medical. We are not interestecihere in degree of hearing loss, the remediation of hearing, audiological measures, speech therapy, or any other medical views of deafness. We regard deafness oilly as the sufficient, but I In accordance with convention in the field of Deaf Studies, we use upper case D (Deaf) when we refer to people who identify with the Deaf community and who use signed language, and lower case d (deaf) to refer merely to the audiological condition. 2 See, for further argument and discussion, Aarons 1996. 3 For an interesting and full discussion of e.g., American Deaf Culture, see Padden and Humpluies, Voices from a Culture 1990.Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics, Vol. 31, 1998, 1-28 doi: 10.5774/31-0-55 2 not necessary precipitant of signed language development, and our concern here is to examine certain sociolinguistic issues that come into play in the consideration of the status of the signed language used in South Africa. The status of natural signed languages internationallyIt is by now uncontroversial, at least among linguists, that natural signed languages used by the Deaf in different parts of the world, are fully-fledged languages, equivalent in all respects to all other natural languages that have been studied. They are acquired naturally by young children, at the same rate, and with the same ease that spoken languages are acquired. They are functionally capable of expressing the entire range of human experience that spoken languages are able to express; they have as many registers, and as much complexity as any other human language.Signed languages have phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic levels of representation. These have been shown to be exactly the same as those proposed for any other human language. The distinguishing feature of signed languages is that they are made through the medium of space, not sound, and that they use the hands, face, ...
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