Semantics: SUDDENLY

[James MacFarlane]

When I looked at the current uses of this sign I found that signers 
used it to signal both 'wrong' in the traditional sense and as a 
conjunction which signals that what is about to come is "unexpected."  
I believe it may have been Humphries and Padden who first wrote about 
this.

However, I did not find data which suggested that when used as a 
conjunction it included some negative meaning.  Rather, (like Theresa 
Smith said) it just signals that the clause that comes  next was 
unexpected.  That unexpected event can be negative or positive, 
however.

What was interesting to me was that there are two different forms of 
the sign.  One with a single movement toward the chin and another with 
a twisting movement on the chin.  The data that I examined showed that 
when used as a conjunction, there was a slight preference for the 
twisted version, but there was no general pattern that emerged.

Here is the reference for that paper:

MacFarlane, J. (1998)  The grammaticization of WRONG in American Sign 
Language.   Proceedings of the First Annual High Desert Linguistics 
Society Conference, (Eds.) Catie Berkenfield, Dawn Nordquist, and Angus 
Grieve-Smith. 1998. Albuquerque, New Mexico: HDLS. 17-23.

James MacFarlane
Instructor: Gallaudet University
Doctoral Candidate: University of New Mexico

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