trochee

So She found out about this event at a local center for the deaf and hard of hearing. A professor from SCCC, who teaches ASL, was giving a ~~talk~~ presentation about two fascinating subjects:

Nicaraguan Sign Language
Language change in ASL

Needless to say, they were both fascinating.

First neat detail: the entire lecture was given in sign, with interpreters speaking aloud for us non-signing audience members. All (save one) of the questions were in ASL as well.

The discussion of Nicaraguan Sign was fun. Though it didn't introduce any new linguistic concepts, Nicaraguan Sign is a good example of how in just a few generations a pidgin can become a creole, and then a fluent language. We saw footage of "first generation" adults, who were essentially signing pidgin, and even my untutored eye could see that they were doing a lot of gestures, hand-waving, and "acting it out", especially when we later saw four-year-old "fourth generation" signers doing their thing -- this kid was awesome. He was so clearly telling a story in fluent, fast NSL, where "acting it out" wasn't happening at all -- instead, this kid was clearly reacting to the story he was telling, just the way I might raise my eyebrows when I expect someone to laugh at my jokes.

The second half of the discussion was focused around language change in ASL. Most of the audience was at least basically competent in ASL, or so it seemed, and so the discussion of "word origin" and "sound changes" in ASL (though he didn't call it that) were easier for them. For the last half hour, we broke into small groups and were asked to discuss the possible meanings of signs we saw in very old films of ASL speakers from 1910 or so. I was really intimidated, though, because nearly everyone signs well. Luckily, a friendly hearing woman sitting near me took pity on me and served as my interpreter for the discussion. But I felt like some first-week ESL students must feel when thrown into a class of people discussing Chaucer: "I can't relate to the language of discussion, let alone the obscure and obsolete dialect you're talking about!" I hope I can keep this lesson in academic humility in hand as I proceed into graduate school...

I couldn't stop myself from noticing -- over and over -- the places where historical change in ASL is so similar to historical changes in, for example, English. The sign for "remember", for example, used to be two signs: "know" (hands above brows) "continuously" (thumbs together, gliding forwards). [I may be mauling the description -- I'm sure there's details that I forgot here!]. "Remember" is now a single sign, moving one thumb down off the temple onto the other, moving forward. The professor pointed out how the common tendency in these changes is for the connecting gesture, between the two compositional parts, to become the non-compositional representation of the previously composed meaning.

Another example: "Tomato" used to be "red" (index vertical before lips) followed by "slice" ("o" sign in base hand, free hand moves across it in slicing motion). Now "tomato" is the vertical index before lips, moving down to base-hand "o". Slicing motion is gone, so is "red". Doesn't this seem sort of like the sort of reanalysis that takes place at the boundaries between morphology and phonology?

These compositional/non-compositional changes remind me so much of bound- and free-morphemes, especially in Chinese. It actually seems to mesh really well with the complexities of bound, root, and free morphemes described in Packard's The Morphology of Chinese.

I wonder whether anybody's looking at morphophonology in ASL?