LL-L "Body language" 2008.07.20 (04) [E]

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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: LL-L "Body language" 2008.07.19 (02) [E]

> From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Body language
>
> Within this context, Sandy brought up the importance
> three-dimensionality plays in sign languages. Clearly, all of us have
> this at our disposal, and many or all of us utilize it. It belongs to
> the broad area of "body language," which I would broadly divide into
> deliberate and autonomous expressions (though there may be a
> transitional category as well). (Autonomous expressions are those that
> reflect your psychological state.)
>
I'm aware that we get away from the Lowlands when we start talking about
languages in general, and I do try to think of the Lowlands connections,
but when everybody else starts talking about Chinese and Australasian
languages as examples of exotic languages, well, BSL is my example of an
exotic language! At least it grew up in a Lowland context  :)

It seems to me that in BSL both deliberate and autonomous body language
can be realise as actual signs - that is, that the Deaf in the past have
picked up on body language and stylised it for use as signs. For
example, the way a person rests their head on their knuckles and their
elbow on the desk is stylised as a sign meaning "sitting about with
nothing to do", and there's the "chin stroking" of someone being
pensive, or the "d'oh!" whack on the head which in BSL become deliberate
stylised signs.

On the face, the tight-lipped expression for "determined" or "annoyed",
the way you open your mouth with your tongue slightly protruding when
disgusted or disappointed, the wrinkled nose, the furrowed brows are all
used as stylised inflections. Not all facial inflections have
corresponding body language manifestations, however (such as widening or
narrowing eyes to mean "big" or "small" respectively).

Gestures used in oral languages can also be signs in BSL, although the
meaning becomes more specific and its application becomes wider. For
example, the "thumb up" gesture means "good" as a BSL sign, but is
inflected to mean such things as "right", "brilliant", "agree",
"unanimous", "better", "much better", and "best". The sign for "bad"
isn't "thumb down", however, it's "pinkie up"! It's just occurred to me
that this might have started as "thumb down", become "thumb down with
pinkie up" (this being a common phonological process in BSL) and then
just "pinkie up", but that's purely amateur etymology!

Thumb up = "good", pinkie up = "bad" isn't a universal, however: in
Taiwanese sign language (and, I seem to remember, Chinese sign
languages), the thumb is a classifier for "man" and the pinkie a
classifier for "woman", a fact that often shocks BSL users and students
so that I have to explain some of the facts of comparative linguistics
to them!

The "thumb down" gesture is used (with a downward movement) in BSL to
mean "let down", eg, "you've let me down". The idea of a let-down is
applied more widely with this sign, however, to mean "lost the game" in
sport and such things as "it started well, but then it was a let down"
to mean something like, "the book had a good beginning but it soon
trailed off."

The "V" gesture in BSL means pretty much the same as it does to the
Hearing, but the "flip" gesture used by Americans is a normal handshape
in BSL which is sometimes now replaced by a different handshape as the
awareness of it as an American gesture increases.

> In deliberate body language people tend to use body (especially facial
> and manual) signals to emphasize important points or to add
> information for which there are no convenient oral symbols. I noticed
> that this tends to be used more among males, especially young males
> who would occasionally demonstrate an event with body language only,
> perhaps accompanied by "sound tracks" as in cartoon movies.

That's an interesting point, the cartoon soundtrack noises, which seem
to be for effect, brevity and (if I remember my younger days) because
the cartoon idiom occurs in the mind so forcefully that words fail to
form.

A discussion that occurs in sign language circles is "Did Fred Quimby
have an HMFD (Hearing, Mother-Father Deaf) person on his staff?" Much of
the "cartoon idiom" we see in his work is also seen in BSL: zooming off
into the distance at impossible speeds, assault with an oversized
weapon, bouncing a few times on the ground after a heavy fall, sudden
freeze-frames and determined, fast-stomping walks are all common
features of BSL idiom. Historical circumstances suggest that the
cartoons must have borrowed from the sign languages rather than the
other way round. After many hours of very serious study of Tom and
Jerry, Bugs Bunny and other subjects, I tend to come to the conclusion
that the only thing they have in common is the medium: both sign
language users and cartoonists (and lately, CGI designers) _can_ distort
their visuals, so they _do_!

Charlie Chaplin is something else, though: his understanding of the
importance of physical characterisation, his very quick, expressive
gestures, his continual use of signs for such things as "love", "cute",
and "happy", the many stylised facial expressions which seem to be just
signs made without the hands, and above all, his performance of a song
without words in the bar-room scene in "Modern Times", often have the
Deaf stroking their chins in a stylised expression of thought.
>
Did Charlie Chaplin know a sign language or study with a sign language
user? I don't think we know, but the signs are all there!

> In Japanese and Chinese cultures, for instance, gestures and facial
> expressions accompany speech far, far less, which in the early days of
> renewed contacts no doubt helped to lead to the stereotype of "the
> inscrutable Asian." Again, those cultures consider such physical
> symbols coarse, and again females use them less than males because
> females must obey stricter rules of propriety.
>
"Must" or "prefer to"? This happens in BSL too. The number "2" is signed
with the fingers together to avoid any possibility of being accused of
using the "V" gesture, although according to the rules of BSL execution
the two can't be confused, so many, especially men, don't bother with
that. But this gets extended to signing other numbers and signs with the
fingers together, which isn't exactly an aid to clarity.

It's not the done thing to sign outside of a box extending from the
waist to just above the head, partly for comfort and ease, but also the
impropriety of exposing armpits or drawing attention to anything below
the waist. So although some body parts are signed by pointing to them,
such things as feet, ankles, knees and legs, not to take it any further,
are signed using the hands as classifiers.

Th-th-th-that's all, Folks!! (as both certain signers and certain
cartoonists would say at the end of a long utterance, because it's only
one sign in BSL; it's all very strange!).

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/

•

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