LL-L "Body language" 2008.07.22 (04) [E]

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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: LL-L "Body language" 2008.07.21 (02) [E]

> From: Elsie Zinsser <ezinsser at mhsc.org.za>
> Subject: L-L 'Grammar'
>
>
> Hi all,
> I've been following this discussion with interest. There was recently
> an interesting research
> article posted on Science Daily saying that, when people use gestures
> they use the same
> grammar sequence of their languages. See:
> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080630173943.htm

That gives a lot of food for thought. Some ravenous thoughts:

The article mentions the famous new (but natural) Al-Sayyid Bedouin sign
language as being SOV like the gestures and transparencies experiment,
but I'm not so sure how well this holds for older sign languages.
Certainly not completely because BSL linguistics researchers at Bristol
University record the simple sentence in BSL as SVO.

I should add that in sign languages a distinction is made between a
"directional verb" (which inflects according to subject and object
position in space and therefore follows a visually-inspired grammatical
rule) and a "plain verb", which has no directional interpretation and
therefore needs a rule for ordering subject verb and object. It's
interesting that for plain verbs the BSL ordering is SVO, the same as in
English. Has BSL borrowed this syntax from English? A very interesting
question (to which I don't know the answer), and finally a solid
Lowlands-Languages connection!

I might propose a theory that sign languages borrow syntax for "plain
sign" constructions from their geographically-associated oral languages,
and retain more visual constructions for directional signs and for
classifiers. It could be tested by seeing if plain sign constructions
follow the associated oral-language constructions in signed-oral
language pairs other than BSL and English. It would be particularly
interesting to know if Welsh dialects of BSL follow Welsh syntax more
than English.

What can we make of the implications of the article for devising a world
language? Is SOV the "natural syntax" we're looking for?

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/

•

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