Multi-channel signs in BSL

gareth — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 20:56:16 +0000

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

gareth — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 13:55:13 +0000

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:

Timeline (yesterday)
Location (your garden)
Object (tree)
Subject (black cat)
Verb (climb)
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!)

Gareth Jones » ordering

Multi-channel signs in BSL

BSL word ordering