now let's take a look at sign language phonology in particular because
obviously since phonology tends to be the study and spoken language of the
smallest little bits of language which are usually just sounds then sign
language is going to have something different because sign language doesn't
use sounds
well we see that spoken language phonemes particular sounds can be broken
down into parts
so you can take the phoneme the S sound the "sss" sound and we can notice where
exactly the tongue is when we make the sound we can notice whether or not air
comes out of the nasal cavity when we make the sound we can notice whether our
vocal cords are vibrating or not when we make the sound we can figure out how
exactly we're making the sound whether we're stopping the sound the air from
coming out or creating friction or sending the the the air out the nose
so the location of the tongue the nationalization whether it's voiced how
exactly it's articulated are all sort of features of phonemes in spoken language
well Stokoe notice this and he thought of signs as sort of each individual
phonemes and he said well look:
each sign has parameters and you can take these parameters the handshape, the palm
orientation, the location the movement and in certain signs the mouth movement
that goes with a sign and but based on these five parameters we can create a
sign the parameter on its own doesn't mean anything
for example if you "the middle of the chest" has no meaning it depends on what you do there
if you point to yourself that means I if you have an open hand and you rub the middle
of the chest that means please or enjoy
but the middle of the chest itself doesn't mean anything the parameter
doesn't mean anything until you put it with the other parameters with a
particular handshape with a particular location with a particular movement then
they can mean something together and so Stokoe thought that this is how we should
think about signs we should break them up into their individual parameters
this is still very common i'm sure you learned about the parameters of signs at
some point when you learned we you first learn American Sign Language
but really this is an old problem this happened in spoken language
- and spoken language at first people just heard words they didn't realize you
could take the words and break them into parts but when they did they broke them
into syllables
they didn't notice that the syllables could then further broken down into
sounds and of course now linguists do that linguists listen to the spoken
language and we break them down into individual sounds well in sign language
they needed to do the same thing
at first they noticed that there were signs and over time
Stokoe said wait these signs can be broken into parameters the five
different ways we can look at the signs but then even within the parameters
there seem to be sequences sequences of movements that happen within the
parameters within the sign itself so signs have a sequence they don't all happen at
once they start in one place and oftentimes there's some sort of movement
they end in another place
you probably remember when you were first looking at parameters back you had
to decide that what's the location of the sign and if you take a sign like
hungry you said well it starts in the center of the chest but it ends down
almost on over the belly
so what is the location where there are two locations
Liddell and Johnson were two linguists who develop movement hold theory and they
said this is the way we're going to describe the fact that signs can be
broken up into sequences
then the whole theory says look signs start and stop throughout the sign
there's a period of time when the the sign is not moving and that's called the
hold and then there are periods of time when the sign is moving and that's the
movement
so we have this X which is used to represent a brief hold a brief stop M
which is used to represent the movement of the hands and then H which is used to
represent a full holder or a longer stop and based on these brief holds these
movements and these stops we see that signs have structure they have a
sequence a beginning a middle and an end
now not all signs have this sequence of hold movement and hold but this is a
pretty common sequence of signs
there'll be an original stopping point of a sign a hold for example in the sign
GOOD
you start the same good writing in front of your chin
with your hand held there for a brief second then the sign moves downward in
out into the space in front of your body where it again
holds so there's a hold of the chin the movement downward and then a hold in
front of the body
that's how you sign the sign good notice the location of the first hold and the
location of the second hold are different the palm orientation the first hold and
the palm orientation of the second hold are different and the first hold your
palm is facing back towards you and in the second hold your palm is facing upward as
you move from good in front of the chin with the palm back to good in front of the
body with the palm facing upward
there's no particular mouth movements that's associated with the word good so we
won't worry about a mouth movement for that but what Liddell & Johnson
discovered in this movement hold theory is that you can break signs up into
individual parts there weren't just five parameters of the sign but each sign had
to be thought of in terms of what happens first
what happened second what happens third that's not always a hold
movement and hold sometimes it will be a complex system of hold movement hold
movement hold or perhaps just a hold or just a movement but regardless there's a
sequence that happens in a sign and we've got to look at the parameters
that happen in each hold in each part of the sign
so if we were to look at the sign goat we can, we can then draw out exactly
how the sign is formed it starts with a hole that the chin with your hand in the
S shape with your palm facing toward the body with no mouth movement
there's been a movement that movement is directly upward as the handshape opens
to the second hold the second hold happens when the movement finishes right
in front of the forehead with the hand now in a 2 with the palm
orientation still facing back toward the head toward the body and with no mouth
movement
so that's the sign for goat so what these link was discovered what
Liddell & Johnson discovered is that each of these segments the first hold the
movement and then the second hold each of these segments is like a phoneme
with its own individual features so just as an english word moves between maybe
the sound s and then the sound tea and then the sound o and then the sound p so
S-T-O-P
you can look at the individual features of the S sound
where's the tongue what's happening with the vocal cord the individual features
of the T sound
where is the tongue what's happening with the vocal cord what's happening in
the nose
how is the sound created and then with the AA and the P sound you can do the
same thing
well in Sign Language you can look at each individual hold in each individual
movement and we can see that based on the hold and the movement there will be various
features location handshape palm orientation and perhaps mouth movement
so what we've discovered is that ASL happens in a way that's very similar to
English just as English moves from consonants two vowels so ASL moves from
stops to holds just as each individual phoneme in English each individual sound
in English can be analyzed so each individual segments in ASL sign can be
analyzed according to its handshapes, its palm orientation,
its movement, etc. so as you think about english and ASL phonology we see that
there really are a lot of similarities
not so many differences