Grammatical Gender in BSL

[Susan Fischer]

To follow up on Ulrike's point, the phenomenon in NS (NihonSyuwa)  is not,
however, grammatical gender in the sense of assigning a near-arbitrary
classification to a noun; rather, the thumbs-up vs. pinkie-up distinction is
limited to  the actual gender of human referents.  Osugi and I call these
Indexical Classifiers, since they often occur where the neutral "person"
classifier would in ASL and other sign languages, and can replace the
referential locus.  According to one Korean linguist whom I met last year,
Korean Sign Language also has similar phenomena (both Korean and Taiwan SLs are
historically related to NS).
Susan

Ulrike Zeshan wrote:

> The closest thing to gender marking that I have seen in sign languages is
> the sub-system in the Japanese Sign Language family where an upright thumb
> stands for male persons and an upright little finger stands for female
> persons. It only works for humans though, so it is not exactly like the
> French example below. For Japanese Sign Language, this gender marking is
> part of the classifier system. In Taiwanese Sign Language, it is part of the
> auxiliary system.
> Ulrike
>
> am 23.06.2002 21:15 Uhr schrieb Adam Schembri, Deaf Studies unter
> Adam.Schembri at BRISTOL.AC.UK:
>
> > I'm not aware of any evidence for grammatical gender in BSL (if by
> > the term grammatical gender, you are referring to the type of
> > grammatical phenomena found in French where nouns are classed into
> > 'masculine' and 'feminine' categories and determiners and adjectives
> > show agreement, as in 'le mur vert' for 'the green wall' versus 'la
> > table verte' for 'the green table').
> >

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Susan Fischer                                e-mail: fischer at mail.rit.edu
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