Posts Tagged ‘grammar’

Modification and intensifiers in BSL

Friday, May 16th, 2008

A really common way of differentiating things like speed, weight, size, etc in BSL is using non-manual features (NMF) such as modifiers and intensifiers. For example, when expressing the speed of someone cycling, I would use a single sign to represent both the fact they were cycling and the speed at which they were going (rather that a sign for ‘cycling’ and one for ‘fast’). This is achieved by both the speed of your signing and also your facial expression – e.g. for ‘cycling quickly’ you might sign ‘cycling’, moving your hands very quickly and clenching your teeth.

Some common uses of facial features for such differentiation are as follows:

  • Pursed lips: taking your time
  • Clenched teeth: in a rush
  • Puffed cheeks: doing hard work, talking about something large/heavy
  • Closed lips (MM): as normal, steadily
  • TH: carelessly/messily, boring
  • Pouted lips: small, few, cheap

P.S. I didn’t do a signed version of this post as I wasn’t quite sure where to start! Apologies but I’m just not good enough :)

Compound signs

Friday, May 16th, 2008

I’ve mentioned compound signs in a previous post but I’ve studied them recently on my BSL course so I thought I’d go into a little more detail. A compound sign is one that is created by combining two (or more) other signs. For example, the sign for ‘believe’ is a combination of the signs for ‘think’ and ‘true’. Note that the lip pattern you use when a compound sign is the sign itself (e.g. ‘believe’) and not the words for the individual component signs (e.g. ‘think’ and ‘true’).

In general this make it easier to remember a few signs as they are made up of logical component signs but it can get a little confusing in some situations. An example that I always forget are the signs for ‘lifeguard’ and ‘lifeboat’. The ‘lifeguard’ sign is made up of the signs for ‘life’ then ‘rescue’, whereas the sign for ‘lifeboat’ is made up of the signs ‘rescue’ then ‘boat’.

A few other common examples are:

  • Deadline – date + cut-off
  • Stranger – person + who?
  • Answer – ask + response
  • Repeat – say + again

Multi-channel signs in BSL

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008

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.

BSL word ordering

Friday, March 21st, 2008

English version

One of the things that people struggle to understand when learning BSL is how the word ordering differs from English. For example, consider the sentence ‘Why was the black cat climbing the tree in your garden yesterday?’. This would be translated to ‘yesterday your garden tree black cat climb why?’. In BSL, words are normally ordered as follows:

  1. Timeline (yesterday)
  2. Location (your garden)
  3. Object (tree)
  4. Subject (black cat)
  5. Verb (climb)
  6. Question (why)

This is a simple example but can be used to help translate any English to BSL. Note that things like ‘and’, ‘because’ and ‘he said’ split a sentence into multiple parts and should be treated individually.

BSL version (I didn’t wimp out this time!)

Learning sign language

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

[Note: I was going to try and translate this post into BSL for the benefit of my readers who sign (there's at least one!) but I have a feeling this post would never appear as I keep putting it off! Maybe next time :) ]

A very good friend of mine (Ben) is deaf. We’ve known each other about three and a half years but communication at first was very slow because Ben is profoundly deaf, his first language is BSL (British Sign Language) and he also doesn’t lipread. We started with writings on pieces of paper being passed back and forth, followed by Ben teaching some basic fingerspelling (signing letters of the alphabet), followed by an introduction to some rudimentary bits of sign language. At this point I decided that learning BSL properly would not only be really interesting, it’d be damn useful to be able to communicate with Ben by a quicker means other than something similar in speed to morse code. Since then I’ve completed the CACDP BSL level 1 and 2 courses and on Tuesday I started my level 3 course (it was supposed to start in September but has been delayed a few times).

This course is even more time consuming that the two before; level 1 was two hours a week, level 3 was two and a half hours and level 3 is now 3 hours. So for the next 30 weeks (plus any holidays the college has) I’ll be studying 6:30 to 9:30 on Tuesday evenings… phew! Given that we’re up to level 3, I expected the class to be quite small but there were 17 of us – and of course I was the only guy, as with both my previous courses. What is it about guys not wanting to learn BSL? Very few centres appear to offer the level 3 course so this probably has something to do with the class size, along with the fact that it appears to be a lot cheaper than anywhere else!

We started with the usual introductory-type things, working in pairs to discuss our jobs, interests etc and then present to the class on the snippets of information we’d gleaned from our partner. Then after a much-needed tea break we jumped straight into a discussion on some fundamental BSL grammatical concepts. The important thing to realise about BSL (and other sign languages) is that it isn’t simply English represented by visual movements; BSL is an entirely different language in its own right with it’s own word ordering and many other unique approaches to communication (although some people do sign with SSE – Sign Supported English). To give you an idea of the things that make up the language, some of the grammatical items we discussed are as follows:

    • Classifiers – different hand shapes used in many different ways
      Proforms – handshapes that change while signing
      Compound signs – merging different signs together to mean something new, e.g. think + true = believe
      Placement – using the signing space around you to represent different things, e.g. referring back to a space which can represent someone or something by pointing or eye movement, listing items on fingers and coming back to the same fingers for the same item, signing multiple items simultaneously such as a person getting onto a bus and sitting down etc.
      Question forms – express questions simply by raising (closed questions) or narrowing (open questions) the eyebrows, or nodding/shaking of the head to imply you think you know the answer
      Negation/Affirmation – nodding or shaking the head to confirm or deny something, e.g. signing ‘computer use’ with a nod would imply you could and with a shake that you can’t
      Timelines – up to five directional movements can be used around the body to represent timelines with different meanings
      Non-manual features – using facial expressions and body language to give extra meaning or to change the meaning during the use of the sign
      Role shifts – representing/simulating different people/animals/etc yourself and switching to others, e.g. to represent two sides of a converstation
  • It’s difficult to explain some of these without a visual aid and I could be doing this all day so these are just quick summaries – feel free to contact me if you want a more detailed explanation.

    So there you go, a quick introduction to my signing history and a glimpse into what a sign language class might involve.