Table Of ContentPrimary Movement
in Sign Languages
Primary Movement
in Sign Languages:
A Study of Six Languages
Donna Jo Napoli
Mark Mai
Nicholas Gaw
Gallaudet University Press / Washington, D. C.
Gallaudet University Press
Washington, DC 20002
http://gupress.gallaudet.edu
© 2011 by Gallaudet University
All rights reserved. Published 2011
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Napoli, Donna Jo, 1948-Primary movement in sign languages : a study of six
languages / Donna Jo Napoli, Mark Mai, Nicholas Gaw.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-13: 978-1-56368-491-3 (hbk. :alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-56368-491-8 (hbk. :alk. paper)
1. Sign language. 2. Deaf—Means of communication. 3. Comparative linguistics.
I. Mai, Mark. II. Gaw, Nicholas. III. Title.
HV2474.N38 2011
419—dc22
2011001091
∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Contents
Foreword vii
Chapter 1. Introduction 1
Chapter 2. Gathering the Data 12
Chapter 3. Analysis of Signs with Noncurve
Paths in ASL, BSL, LIS, LSF, and Auslan 36
Chapter 4. Analysis of Signs with Curve Paths
in ASL, BSL, LIS, LSF, and Auslan 73
Chapter 5. Unusual Symmetry or Other Oddities
in ASL, BSL, LIS, LSF, and Auslan 90
Chapter 6. Results from the Study of
ASL, BSL, LIS, LSF, and Auslan 107
Chapter 7. Testing and Beyond 126
Appendices 149
Bibliography 195
Index 207
v
Foreword
We began our work as a comparative study across five sign languages:
American Sign Language (ASL), British Sign Language (BSL), Italian
Sign Language/lingua italiana dei segni (LIS), French Sign Language/
langue des signes française (LSF), and Australian Sign Language
(Auslan). Our initial question was whether it was possible to identify
(even roughly) sign languages by their prosody, and, if so, our goal
was to offer such identification as a new way to typologize sign
languages.
Once we had settled on direction of movement as the one prosodic
factor to track, we found that prosodic identification of sign languages
did appear to be possible. The languages in our study clustered with
respect to several characteristics along genetic lines, with BSL and
Auslan contrasting with LSF, LIS, and ASL—a heartening finding.
Interestingly, however, we also found characteristics with respect
to which BSL and LSF behaved as a group while Auslan, LIS, and
ASL behaved as a contrasting group. We hypothesized that sign
languages that are direct descendants of a mother sign language
and that have remained in the geographical home of the mother
language (origin-bound languages) contrast with sign languages
that have evolved in a different geographical home from that of the
mother language and in contact with the indigenous sign languages
of the new home (diaspora languages). This hypothesis is quite
different from what one might expect given research on the history
of spoken languages; reasons unique to how sign languages are
disseminated may help account for it.
We also found certain ways that sign languages for which the con-
tact spoken language is English (that is, BSL, Auslan, and ASL) con-
trast with sign languages for which the contact spoken language is a
Romance language (LIS and LSF). We connect this fact not to aspects
vii
viii
Foreword
of the grammar of the contact spoken languages but to the frequen-
cy and nature of gestures accompanying speech in those languages.
Finally, we isolated some characteristics that set apart individual
languages from all the others, and we generated a list of character-
istics to compare languages and to assess their degree of similarity
with respect to direction of movement path.
At that point a reviewer suggested we test our hypotheses on other
languages, particularly on new languages and on languages that had
little to no contact with either of the two language families of our
other five sign languages. But by that point we three scholars had
scattered to the winds—with only one of us remaining in the field of
linguistics. Nevertheless, working by email and with only intermittent
face-to-face meetings, we did manage to test our hypotheses against
a sixth sign language: Nicaraguan Sign Language/idioma de señas
de Nicaragua (ISN). Many of our results were confirmed, whereas
others could not be tested (given the degree of contact between
ASL and ISN). It is our fondest hope that some new research team
will now take up the flag and march onward, perhaps by looking at
village sign languages in Africa or Asia or both.
Many helped us in this project, and we give a blanket thank you
now to all, as well as the following specific thanks. Adam Schembri,
Bencie Woll, and, especially, Rachel Sutton-Spence were generous
with comments on an earlier draft. Karen Emmorey, Susan Gol-
din-Meadow, Brian Joseph, Gaurav Mathur, and David McNeill
allowed us to bounce ideas off them and offered feedback. Rebecca
Black and Myles Dakan helped with initial work on documenting
the characteristics of curve paths in spring 2008. Dorothy Kunzig
helped in Xeroxing the dictionaries, took the photos of our ASL
model, and drew the arrows on those illustrations. Rosanna Kim
served as our ASL model. Steve Wang advised us on which statistical
tests to perform. We also thank anonymous reviewers, without
whom this book would be much impoverished and the final chapter
would not even exist.
1
Introduction
The past fifty years have witnessed a flowering of research on sign
languages, largely on their phonology and morphology but in more
recent years increasingly on their syntax and semantics. The first
decade of this century also experienced rich comparative work
across sign languages. For example, the Sign Language Typology
Research Group at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston,
United Kingdom, often in cooperation with the Max Planck
Institute for Psycholinguistics in Leipzig, Germany, has been and is
presently instrumental in multiple projects. These projects range
from cataloging and describing endangered and little known sign
languages in a browsable corpus to studies of specific topics, such
as negative and interrogative constructions, possessive and existen-
tial constructions, numeral incorporation, and agreement systems.
The Sign Language Typology Research Group has also organized
international workshops in which researchers of sign typology can
get together and discuss their results. Ulrike Zeshan (2004a, 2004b,
2006) has been at the forefront of much of this work, particularly
on interrogatives and negatives.
Additionally, there has been considerable work on word order
in particular sign languages, (from the seminal work of Fischer
[1975] and the classic work of Volterra et al. [1984] to many of the
articles in Brennan and Turner [1994] and the considerable work
since), although several factors seem to stand in the way of a word-
order typology for sign. Although sign languages vary in many ways
syntactically (see Perniss, Pfau, and Steinbach 2007), typically they
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