ABSL: no sublexical structure?

[dcogill at une.edu.au]

Hi all,

I appreciate this is a different point from Adam's - he's wanting to check
out the size, and the uniformity, of the data base. But since there's so
far no discussion from those who can answer this question...I want to
start a new side-track, about WHEN one might expect high versus low levels
of sublexical structure in a manual communication system.

The thing is, didn't Washabaugh conclude something similar to Aronoff
here, for the signing of Providence Island? Am I right in thinking that
Washabaugh found relatively low levels of sublexical strcture there as
well?  (Five Fingers For Survival, I think the book was called - oh dear,
my memory gets worse and worse.) And didn't Washabaugh conclude that this,
and other features of the communication system, were likely due to the
situation of use of the system? Yes, there was a a lot of
genetically-based deafness on Providence island, and yes, this had been
true for some time. And yes, most people, deaf and hearing too, could
communicate manually. But the deaf people there were geographically
scattered, and most of them did most of their communication with just a
few immediate relatives, who they actually lived with.

So even though much vocabulary was shared across the island,  manual
communication was mostly done in situations of enormously high shared
contextual knowledge; about as high as one can imagine. Interesting if
this contributes not only to the level of syntactic structure that
emerges, but even to the level of sublexical structure...

Where my line of thinking intersects with yours, Adam, is that where you
are thinking that (if the data is sufficiently extensive to justify the
conclusion of low and varying levels of sublexical structure), there are
perhaps a collection of home sign systems within ABSL. I'm thinking -
perhaps such situations might be conceived of as a single communication
system, with a lot of individual variation -  simply, this variation
includes individual variation in the LEVEL of structure, too.

Hm. Does that reconceptualisation make any difference? Possibly not!

Anyway, this makes two people pleading for more hard information about
ABSL, to help us out here! Only I want to add to Adam's query - if there
IS variation in the level of sublexical structure individuals use, might
that have any rough correlation with the customary situation of use of the
signing, for that individual?  If not now, then when they were children,
first acquiring the system?

Oh, looking at that, I realise - that's probably a research question, a
PhD topic! Not a question to pose on an online list.  Ah well. Perhaps
someone can help us out anyway.

Dorothea.







On Tue, January 29, 2008 11:52 pm, Adam C Schembri wrote:
> I have just finished teaching introductory classes on sign language
phonology here at UCL, and my students and I are intrigued by the claim
by Aronoff (2007) that Al Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language lacks examples of
minimal pairs contrasting in hand configuration, location and movement.
He claims that, as a result, ABSL appears to show no evidence of
phonological structure.
>
> Unfortunately, Aronoff (2007) does not provide sufficient information
(how large was the database of signs drawn on when looking for minimal
pairs?) to evaluate this claim, and hints that individual families
within this village sign language community show more patterned use of
sublexical elements (do we thus have a collection of home sign systems
rather than a shared community-wide sign language?).
>
> If anyone can assist with more information (Carol Padden? Wendy
> Sandler?), I'd love to know more.
>
> Reference:
> Aronoff, M. (2007). In the beginning was the word. Language 83 (4), pp.
803-830.
>
> Thanks,
> Adam
>
> --
> Adam C Schembri, PhD
> Project Director, British Sign Language Corpus Project
> Deafness, Cognition and Language (DCAL) Research Centre
> University College London
> 49 Gordon Square
> London WC1H 0PD
> United Kingdom
> http://www.dcal.ucl.ac.uk/team/adam_schembri.html
> www.bslcorpusproject.org
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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Dr Dorothea Cogill-Koez,
School of Behavioural, Cognitive and Social Sciences,
University of New England,
Australia.





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