Primary 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 1