Syntax is the term for the way that words or signs are put together to create meaningful sentences and phrases. Although there are conventions in written English to mark the beginnings and ends of sentences, there is no formal agreement on what a sentence is. It is very difficult to define a sentence, but most people have a rough feeling that they know a sentence when they see or hear one.

Although words have their own meanings, the order of words or signs in a language is just as important in relation to meaning. If words and signs are not combined according to the syntactic rules of the language, the meaning is either lost, changed, or becomes unclear.

Before we can address the syntax of BSL sentences in much depth, we need to consider the idea of ‘proforms’, and how and why BSL uses them. Understanding and using proforms in BSL is essential for the understanding of the syntax of BSL.

A proform is anything that refers to, and stands in the place of, something previously identified. The identification may have been made using a sign for the referent, or the referent may be present for all to see. For example, the sign CAR has a related proform (a ‘B’ hand (see Conventions for an explanation of this and other symbols)) that is used to provide more information about the location of the car and the action it is involved in.

In previous chapters we have discussed the ways signs are combined and changed in BSL grammar. Here we explore the basic ‘building-blocks’ of single signs. Signs, like any use of the body for communication, can be called gestures, but they form only a small set of the possible gestures that can be made, and they differ in specific ways from most gestures. We will begin by describing the elements which combine to form the signs of BSL and then discuss the relationship between gestures which are part of the language and gestures which are not.

In chapter 1 we discussed the design features of human language. One of those features is duality. A small set of basic meaningless features can be used to build up a large set of meaningful signs. The study of how these small units combine to create larger units is called phonology. An important principle of phonology is that it is not concerned with little variations which do not contribute to differences in meaning. For example, middle-aged female learners of BSL often keep their fingers together where other signers spread them, as in SIGN, but such variation is not ‘contrastive’, and therefore is not the concern of phonology (fig. 9.1). However, if SIGN was articulated with ‘A’ handshapes, it would no longer mean SIGN, it would mean ENGINE. So we can say that ‘A’ contrasts with ‘5’ and is therefore part of BSL phonology, as phonology is the study of the smallest contrastive units of language.

In this chapter we will continue our discussion of the origin of signs. We have already seen that they can be derived from a representation of the visual form of the referent, or created by metaphorical extension (often drawing on some visual metaphor). This chapter will consider several other mechanisms for creating signs in BSL, including new signs made by derivation. We will also consider signs that are not a permanent part of the BSL lexicon; they are created ad hoc, for the moment. We will also consider the use of simultaneous signs for creating new meanings.

The signs of BSL can be divided into those that are part of the ‘established’ lexicon, and those that are part of the ‘productive’ lexicon. Before we consider any more processes for creating signs, it is worth considering these two groups of signs.

English speakers have a large set of words to choose from, and they can combine these words together to make sentences. English creates new words by adding prefixes and suffixes, or by making compounds from two existing words, or by extending the meaning of a word to give it a new meaning. It can also borrow words from other languages. On the whole, though, these productive processes are not much used and English has a fairly large, fairly stable lexicon.

BSL is very different. In BSL, there are far fewer ‘basic signs’ fixed in the lexicon, but the process of using signs not in the established lexicon is much more important. The BSL/English Dictionary lists pictures of only 1,789 signs.

This chapter will address the different types of socially unacceptable language, why these are used and how. It will not deal with ‘rude’ or ‘coarse’ signs, except where it is necessary to give examples of particular linguistic points. Readers interested in taboo signs are referred to Martin Colville's Signs of a Sexual Nature, which is still the best source text for this area of BSL linguistics.

Coarse language is an important part of many languages, but it is traditionally not studied by many linguists. To a certain extent, this is because not much coarse language is written down. Also, many people see coarse language as something to use only with their friends, so they will not use it in front of a researcher.

This is particularly true of BSL. Many deaf people are reticent about using rude or coarse language in front of hearing people or any linguist doing research in the language. Some of this feeling may be related to the tradition that the only hearing people in contact with the Deaf community were missioners. Some ‘socially unacceptable’ signs are included in the BSL/English Dictionary. The makers of the dictionary had a responsibility to include these signs, although they also had a responsibility to note that these signs were unacceptable to many people. When the dictionary first came out, some people expressed disquiet because it contained a sign glossed as xJEW that many people found offensive.

In the previous chapter we introduced the basic idea of morphemes, and then considered some of the ways that morphemes are used in BSL. We looked in some detail at nouns and adjectives. This chapter will focus on the morphological information that can be found in BSL verbs.

BSL verbs contain a considerable amount of morphological information, and very much more than English verbs do. The three types of information featured here (aspect, manner, and mood) are usually provided in English through the use of separate adverbs; in BSL the information is often incorporated into the verb itself. Before we consider these three inflections, however, it is worth discussing tense. BSL does not use tense, while English does.

TENSE

Tense is one way of locating events in time. It means showing time by adding morphemes to verbs to provide information such as ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’. Some languages have tenses indicating ‘distant past’ and ‘distant future’ too. Tense is deictic; that is, it needs a specific reference point for it to have any real meaning. Using a reference point of ‘the present’, English verbs show when an event occurs by adding this information morphologically. There is little evidence so far that BSL uses tense, but it is a feature worth discussing because so many other languages do, including English.

The main part of this book concerns the structure of BSL. We will be describing the way that the language works and how it can express different types of linguistic information. However, it is important to remember that all languages are used within a social context. To understand how a language is used, it is important to understand the interaction between the language and the communities that use it.

By now it should be clear that British Sign Language is the language of the British Deaf community. Its lexicon is different from other sign languages. Sign languages are not universal, and most sign languages are mutually unintelligible. The sign languages of all Deaf communities are independent of (even if they are influenced by) the spoken language of the surrounding hearing communities. For this reason there is very little similarity between American Sign Language, Irish Sign Language, and British Sign Language. The three Deaf communities are independent of each other, and so are the three sign languages.

However, some sign languages are historically related to each other. They are more similar to each other than to languages that are not related. In a similar way, some spoken languages are related. If we know German, we can read some Dutch, to which German is closely related. If we know Spanish, we can read Portuguese fairly easily, again, because the two languages are related. However, knowing Dutch and German will do us little good if we try to read Finnish, to which neither is related.

In the last chapter we discussed the productive and established lexicons and simultaneous signs. We said that signs in the productive lexicon are a very important part of signing BSL. In this chapter we will discuss another way for new signs to enter the language, through borrowing. As well as creating signs from within the language, BSL can borrow signs from other languages. It can borrow from other sign languages or it can borrow from English, either through the process of ‘loan translation’ or through fingerspelling.

As an illustration of these processes, we will also look at signs for brand names, people, and places. Personal name signs are particularly useful to study here because they show many different sign-formation processes. They provide a way to summarise some of the different ways that BSL adds to its lexicon.

BORROWING

BSL borrows from other languages. By this we mean that it uses signs that are derived from words or signs of other languages. English also borrows from other languages. There are a great many English words that can be traced to other languages and the process continues today. For example, jihad has recently come into English from Arabic, and karaoke has been borrowed from Japanese.

It is important to note that after a long time these words are often not recognised as foreign.

In this chapter we discuss the idea of ‘units of meaning’ in BSL. Morphology is the area of linguistics concerned with the meaning of words and signs and their structure.

WHAT IS A MORPHEME?

A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning in a word or sign. If we break words or signs into smaller and smaller units, eventually they no longer have any meaning. In BSL, morphemes can be combined to make a sign that has several meaningful parts to it, but which is still a single sign.

Sometimes one morpheme is exactly one sign, and one sign is exactly one morpheme. This occurs where the sign only has one unit of meaning. In some languages, almost all words contain only one morpheme. This means there is only one unit of meaning in every word. The Chinese language is one example. There are many BSL signs and English words that only contain one unit of meaning. English and BSL (and many other languages) also have words and signs containing more than one morpheme. These are called ‘polymorphemic’ words or signs from the Greek poly (‘many’) and morph (‘form’).

The following signs cannot be broken down into smaller meaningful units, so they are single morphemes (‘monomorphemic’ signs): TRUE, SAY, MOUSE, RED, KITCHEN, HAPPY, AEROPLANE.

The following signs are all single signs that have at least two meaningful units, so they are polymorphemic: PROMISE (made up from SAY + TRUE), BELIEVE (made up from THINK + TRUE), SPACE-SHUTTLE, MINICOM, YOU-TEASE-ME, DRIVE-CASUALLY, CHECK (made up from SEE + MAYBE), ANIMAL-JUMP-OVER-WALL (fig. 6.1).

This chapter continues the discussion of the sources of signs, focusing in the first section on how handshapes are used in visually motivated signs. In the second section, we consider the role of metaphor in the creation of the BSL lexicon.

All signers use visually motivated signs, but most of the time they use these signs automatically without thinking about why they are made that way or what information is included. Understanding how signs show different degrees of visual motivation, and in different ways, is very important when it comes to understanding how to create new signs. We will talk about this more in chapter 11. For now, we can say that it is important to understand how BSL can reflect the visual nature of an object or an action.

CLASSES OF VISUALLY MOTIVATED SIGNS

In the 1970s, the American sign linguist Mark Mandel classified visually motivated signs into different groups:

1. (a) those that show an image of the referent or action itself (these are ‘presentation’ signs, because we present the referent or action in some way); and

2. (b) those that make a picture of the referent, either by drawing it or by making the shape of it with the hands (these are ‘depiction’ signs because they make a picture).

Presentable objects

These can be pointed to, because they are present. There is no specific sign because the referent is in the environment, so simply pointing will give all the information needed.

QUESTIONS

All languages can ask questions. In chapter 1, where we discussed characteristics of communication systems, we found that animals and traffic lights cannot ask questions in the way humans can with language. BSL can ask questions, just as well as English can.

Language users know how to ask a question, but actually a ‘question’ is quite difficult to define. Questions can be defined by their function (the reason for asking a question), or by their formor structure (how a speaker or signer knows that a sentence is a question, and not a command or a declarative statement).

Anyone who knows English has no problem saying what is and what is not a question. The same is true for sentences in BSL; signers know what is a question and what is not. However, it is much more difficult to describe the rules for forming questions.

QUESTION FUNCTION

Questions have a basic function in language – they can be treated as requests for information. One definition of a question is that it expects (although does not necessarily get) a response, and preferably an answer.

A response is something that follows and relates to what another person has said, whether or not that other sentence was a question.

Mary: Lovely day!

Jane: Yes, and I've heard it'll last.

In this example, Jane is responding to what Mary has said, but Mary's sentence was not a question and Jane's response is not an answer.