Group 4 Language Blog

As I was skimming through the language log, I found an entry that caught my eye. It was “yeah no” by Mark Liberman. He discusses how people often say “yeah no” when answering questions. His example is, “Did you like Columbia?” “Yeah no I loved it.” The entry talks mostly about who uses this statement most. However, this is not he aspect I found to be most interesting. There was something that really surprised me. While I was reading the article I had the notion in my head that, “well, obviously people say ‘yeah no’ sometimes, when they are answering questions like: ‘Did you not like that food.’” The yeah is in immediate response, in an effort to quickly let the asker know that you did like the food, and the no is to indicate that there statement was wrong. As I read more of the blog entry I found my assumption was entirely off.
I kept telling myself that these speakers, using “yeah no” were incorrect, that they should just be saying one or the other, for example, “No, I did like that food.” I was wrong however. As Liberman explains, “Here both yeah and no are independently appropriate – ‘yeah I loved it’ because the basic answer to the question is positive, and ‘no I loved it’ because love is being contrastively substituted for like. This may seem like a weird thing to blog about. I just thought it was interesting that for my last assignment for this class I was reminded one more time that I do not understand language. There are many misconception surrounding language and even after taking this class I am not immune to misconceiving.

Continue reading "Yes or no!?" »

Chapter 14 of Talking Hands talks about how signers make errors when signing due to single formational parameters. This is the same way that people who use verbal language can mistake one word for another because of simple sound based errors. When nondeaf people mishear words this can be attributed to them not paying attention, the speaker not annunciating clearly, or their being static in the conversation and simply not being able to hear the speaker. Do these same type of behaviors occur in deaf people when they misunderstand a sign? It might be because they were not paying attention or the signer was being lazy and not fully expressing the sign, but what might other reasons be as to why they might misunderstand such as in the way that we do when we mishear someone? Are the same reasons hearing people misunderstand the same way that deaf people do to?

I remember reading in Talking Hands about how important facial expressions are when signing to someone. I’ve been told that I use a lot of facial expressions when I speak and was interested to see just how signers utilize them as well.

Facial expressions are very important in assisting signers and helping them to understand one another. An example of possible expressions, besides typical expressions that show emotion (smiling when we’re happy, etc), include eye gazes, eye shifts, clenched teeth, tilting one’s eye brows and head shifts. These signs may be especially important in certain situations because some signs used in sign language can be used to show two different things, depending on how one moves their head or the expression that they have on their face. If one actually mouths words while signing it also helps their partner learn to lip read and associate certain words with certain mouth gestures. In this way the mouth can also be an integral part of communicating.

In the same way that a person can be unenthusiastic with their speech, which may confuse their conversational partner, signers can be halfhearted when they sign. Just as this would confuse a verbal partner it also confuses a signer’s partner of what exactly they are signing. It can also send a message that they are not interested in speaking with them. Therefore the importance of using facial expressions properly is very important, especially because the audience of a signer looks at their face more than the signer’s hands when conversing with them.

http://www.essortment.com/lifestyle/signlanguageex_shrn.htm

Fox mentions several examples of recall errors that were made by hearing people and deaf people. The errors seemed to indicate that those who could hear encode language based on phonology and that deaf people encode language in a more visual-manual manner. This makes sense. But, what about those children who are bilingual in English and ASL, who learn both languages simultaneously in the critical period? How do they ultimately encode either ASL or English? This question is especially interesting when considering someone who speaks English while signing. Are they accessing a phonological or visual lexicon, or both at the same time? Is it possible to have two lexicons? If so, can someone access them both at one time?

Chapter 13 talks about homesigning. I am completely amazed and really confused how these deaf children were able to invent their own language. But even more, how is it possible that even though they had absolutely no exposure or knowledge about spoken language, that their homesigning still followed the same rules? Especially when they were exposed to gesturing. Why didn't their signing become similar to the gesturing of their parents? The gesturing was the only kind of communication they were exposed to, so why wasn't it incorporated into their homesign? And lastly, after they established their homesign, how did the gesturing of their parents effect them? Would it confuse them, or would they somehow be able to differentiate beetween the two? I guess I'm just confused because I don't know if they would understand the concept of our gesturing as an addition to our language, because for them, the gesturing is their language.

This article talks about how American Sign Language has shifted from being more iconic to consisting of more arbitrary gestures. It disproves many myths about ASL, for example that it is universal. But if this were the case, than the French and British would able to understand it. They have their own sign language and can't understand ours. The second myth is that ASL is simply pantomimic. But if this were the case, then wouldn't anyone be able to understand it? Even someone who has never come across it before should be able to understand what is being communicated if the signs exactly mimic the verbal words. And wouldn't this also make sign language universal for everyone?

This article interested me because I remembered the class we had maybe a week or two ago when we were talking about Saussure. I don't think we every really came to a conclusion on whether we thought that sign language was more arbitrary or iconic. So I guess this article is just another viewpoint we can add into our debate about it.

Continue reading "Arbitrariness vs iconicity in ASL" »