MARTHA KAPEROTXIPI URAIN

Universidad de País Vasco

Sign language phonology and the system

Fonética y Fonología

The aim of this paper is to provide a general view of Sign Language Phonology and of the system I am developing for describing the contact signing area. All that will be done to prove the Universality of language. I will take into account the research works developed by Rodríguez (1992), Muñoz (1999), and Herrero (2003) in Spanish Sign language, and the research done by Brentari (1998) in American Sign Language.

First I will provide some general clues about Sign Language Phonology, specially on the parameters that form a sign?Hand Shape, Movement, Location, Orientation and Facial Expression among others?. Then, I will focus my presentation on Location, because it can be taken as a mental parameter that is concretized in the different locations in the contact signing space used by deaf and deaf-blind signers. In the presentation, I will show the system I am developing for classifying those locations, for what I will divide the articulators that take part in signing into 11 absolute regions, and each of them into 9 relative regions. I will also show the features needed for doing so by using a binary system and the theoretical framework that I am assuming is the Generative model.

It is fascinating that every signer all over the world uses the same signing space or areas in their production?head, face, neck, cheast, stomach, arms and hands?that can be put on a map or cartography, where each language will have its language specific cheremes (Sign Language´s cheremes = oral language´s phonemes). Sign Language users all over the world focus their production towards another person that listens to them face to face, to communicate with each other and to develop their knowledge of language. From a scientific point of view, this provides us a clue about which mechanisms the brain developes in order to communicate when something fails in the machinery and, so, the way the mind/brain work. So, we, as thinking beings, need to delimit our sign language, our places of articulation and locations, in the same way it was done with the sound track for oral languages (Chomsky, 1986). This paper will therefore propose the beginning of a map or cartography of all the different places of articulation in the contact signing space of and for both deaf and deaf-blind signers.

Asociación de Jóvenes Lingüistas
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