A survey of reports of sign order from 42 sign languages leads to a handful of generalizations. Two accounts emerge, one amodal and the other modal. We argue that universal pressures are at work with respect to some generalizations, but that pressure from the visual modality is at work with respect to others. Together, these pressures conspire to make all sign languages order their major constituents SOV or SVO. This study leads us to the conclusion that the order of S with regard to verb phrase (VP) may be driven by sensorimotor system concerns that feed universal grammar.
This paper will focus on the turn-taking patterns of Deaf signers and will compare them with turn-taking patterns found in spoken interaction. Turntaking in the conversation of hearing people has been the subject of considerable attention, but the way conversation is organised by Deaf conversationalists has received less attention. This paper reports on a small project involving conversational data obtained from two Deaf friendship groups, one all-female and one all-male. Our main aim was to establish whether Deaf interactants orient to a one-at-a-time model of turn-taking, or whether there was any evidence to suggest they can also orient to a more collaborative model. It has been assumed by researchers in the ®eld of Deaf Studies that Deaf interactants orient to a one-at-a-time model since, where the medium of communication is visual rather than sound based, participants can attend to only those sources of talk that they can see. The paper also examines the data to see if there are any gender dierences in the way Deaf interactants organise conversation.
British Sign Language is a language exhibiting extensive regional variation and undergoing rapid change, in a period of changing attitudes to the language and the community of signers. Fingerspelling (a representation of written English) is an aspect of BSL that reflects these variations strongly. Analysis of interviews with Deaf signers appearing on BBC television shows that use of fingerspelling may vary according to various demographic factors and the signers' use of voice. There has also been a decrease in the overall use of fingerspelling in BSL over the last 10 years. Strong evidence is presented to support the claim that fingerspelling in BSL is of two distinct linguistic types. Some fingerspelling involves code-mixing with English, whereas some has become incorporated into the language itself. Further evidence for such a "discontinuity" between the code-mixing and borrowing is presented and discussed.This article forms part of a larger study into the recent changes and variation found in British Sign Language (BSL), the native language of the British Deaf community. BSL is used by approximately 50,000 Deaf people and is Britain's fourth most widely used indigenous language. As there is no established written form of the language, the history of the language is sketchy. The first written records we have of British Sign Language date back to the 17th century, but these do not suggest that it is a new language (Bulwer, 1644(Bulwer, , 1648. BSL is a visual-gestural language in which signs represent referents in much the same way as words do in spoken languages. Lexical information is encoded in configurations and movements of the hands and arms.
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