Hello all, I get a lot of questions in regarding to many different topics in ASL. Many people who ask me ASL related questions are second language learners and they continually struggle with sentence structure and grammar associated with the target language. Lets pick a question. What is Topicalization in ASL and how does this work? You may be reading Linguistics of American Sign Language, The Gallaudet Green Books series American Sign Language: A Teachers Resource Text, Deaf Tend Your, A Basic Course in American Sign Language, Grammar Gesture and Meaning in American Sign Language, and Ben Bahans dissertation Realization of Agreement in American Sign Language. You could also watched videos such as The Face of ASL by SMI inc and 1000 ASL Faces from Signs of Development. Not to mention that you attend several workshop regarding to this information. Youre always trying to reconcile seemingly conflicting information. Many of these sources say different things about what can be topicalized and how a topic is marked. Some say that only nouns and noun phrases may be topicalized. Of those that specify only nouns some say that only the Object of a sentence may be topicalized and others say that the Subject or the Object can be topicalized. Some authors say that clauses may be topicalized and then predicated by certain modals and signs such as KNOW, DONT-KNOW, and so on. A few give expamples of topicalized verb phrases. There is also disagreement about how topics are marked with NMS. All agree that a brow raise is one part but some say that the head should be tilted back and others tilted forward. Bahan identifies 3 different topic markers that are used depending on the specific needs of the sentence. Some seem to identify the NMS for Relative Clauses as a topic marker. So how do you make sense of it all? Heres my answer regarding to this and any other topics you might be thinking about. To be honest, I dont have the answer. Nobody does at this point. It would seem that everyone is grasping their straws claiming that they know about a specific topic even when there are holes in their theory/theories. So Ill explain whats really happening and hopefully help you know how to steer your struggle with conflicting information into something you can live with. Lets go back in time. Why is English easily understood via sentence structure and deep-rooted structures? The answer is because they had over a thousand year of studying the English syntax. This is why we know exactly how English language work. Now ask yourself this.. How long have we been researching ASL? If you count Dr Bill Stokess time till now... its 54 years old. We are not even a hundred years old in the field of ASL research. So when this happens, many researchers will guess or claim that so and so is this. Most of the time, its not always the case. In regards to topicalization, no matter how many different opinions are out there. I cannot point out which one is accurate. (They might be half right about it) One reason for that is because we do not fully understand ASL syntax and topicalization falls under that category. Until we fully understand ASL syntax then we would fully understand or know how to label it correctly. (For all we know, it might be called a different name ten years from now) Regarding to ASL syntax, I have my hypothesis on how it works. Even my hypothesis have holes in it. We wont know until two more hundred years from now or maybe more. The best you can do or guess is to find what is inside ASL. Only then we can later decide how they fit in the structure puzzle. I hope this helps you understand what we all are going through in the field of ASL research. My studies for the last 30 years is in the area of mouth morphemes and Onomatopoeia. I can pretty much answer any questions regarding to the two topics but when it comes to syntax and how it works. Nobody really knows.. I know its not much of an answer youre looking for but more of a reality check of whats really going on. Most linguists knows my comment above is true. It takes time and many people to get a good understanding how ASL works. Even Yoda came close to speaking our structure.
Posted on: Sat, 24 May 2014 17:04:43 +0000
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