One interesting aspect of BSL grammar is multi-channel signs; these are special signs where both manual (i.e. using your hands) and non-manual (e.g. facial expressions, lip patterns etc) actions are combined to form a single sign. In my BSL course on Tuesday we covered over 80 different examples of multi-channel signs and also discussed how they fit into BSL sentence structure. In general, multi-channel signs seem to be positioned after the verb part of a sentence (see my previous post on word ordering). For example, consider the sentence “I haven’t bought a new jacket for ages”. There’s a multi-channel sign for ages, so this could be translated to “Jacket new buy ages”.
By the way, today my friend Ben was on See Hear as one of the 4 selected deaf faces of 2008 – take a look.
Tags: bsl, deaf, grammar, language, multi-channel, ordering, sign, word