1. An American Deaf Community

American Sign Language (abbreviated ASL) is a visual-gestural language used by deaf people, their friends, and their family members in the United States and parts of Canada. Deaf people who use ASL typically prefer the term deaf over other terms like hearing-impaired. Though deafness and the use of a sign language are related, they cannot be conflated. For one thing, not all Americans who have hearing loss use ASL or participate in the ASL-signing community. Many hearing children are also born into families that use ASL, and they acquire ASL naturally as a first language. There are also increasing numbers of hearing people who have learned ASL as a second language, whether through classes in school as young adults or through some other means. In light of all of these factors, it is difficult to reliably estimate the size of the ASL-signing community, though a conservative approximation may be that there are around 250,000 fluent ASL signers in the US.

Despite the common misconception that "sign language" is universal, due to its perceived similarity to gesture, which is also commonly believed to be universal, there are well over 100 different sign languages used in different communities world-wide. At the same time, ASL is indeed becoming increasingly widespread as a second language lingua franca for many deaf people around the world. Another common misconception about ASL is that it is derived from English. As a minority language in the United States, ASL is in fact subject to significant influence from English, however, as we will see in this Language Profile, ASL is much more than just "English on the hands".

Modern American Sign Language is descended from a variety of French Sign Language that was brought to serve as the language of instruction in the first American School for the Deaf, which was founded in Connecticut in 1817. As deaf students graduated from the American School for the Deaf, several moved westward to teach at other deaf schools throughout the United States. By 1880, in addition to schools, deaf Americans had created their own churches, clubs, and newspapers around the country, which helped them maintain and develop their language and community. However, in the 1890s, many schools for the deaf in Europe and the US began to emphasize speech therapy and forbid signing, known as the "oral" method of instruction. Over the following decades, ASL became stigmatized even among many ASL signers, who were led to view ASL as inferior to English.

It was really only in the second half of the 20th century that ASL started to be recognized and respected as a minority language in the US. In 1960, the first linguistic analysis of ASL was published, spurring the linguistics community to recognize that ASL is as full and complex as any other human language. In the late 1980s, students at Gallaudet University protested that the university should appoint a "Deaf President Now", and the protest, which was ultimately successful, garnered national media attention, bringing deafness and ASL into mainstream cultural awareness.

Since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, deaf Americans have also enjoyed increased accessibility accommodations, including ASL interpreters and assistive technology like closed captioning. However, the majority of deaf Americans also still experience barriers to communication and information on a daily basis. Today, many hearing Americans are at least aware of ASL and the American deaf community, having seen ASL interpreters working at televised broadcasts and other events with large audiences. Relatively recently, deaf people and their language have also been featured on mainstream television programs, whether in scripted shows like Switched at Birth, in reality shows like America's Next Top Model, and in movies like The Eternals.

2. The Structure of ASL Signs

There is no conventional writing system that has been adopted by the ASL signing community, and sign language linguists have not developed a practical system for phonetic transcription of sign language data that is comparable to the International Phonetic Alphabet. It is therefore not possible to phonetically transcribe ASL signs or narratives in the same way that we are accustomed to doing for spoken languages, even for those without their own writing systems. However, since at least the 1920s, the ASL signing community has embraced video technology as a way of documenting and preserving ASL narratives. Modern technology has enabled amateur and professional filmmakers to record, edit, and distribute videos digitally, and the ASL signing community has also adopted this technology for their own use. Accordingly, here we will discuss still images of signs taken from videos in the linguistic resource ASL Signbank.

2.1 Signs

At the most basic level, ASL signs can be described in terms of the active articulators and the way the articulators move during the production of the sign. Typically, but not always, the articulators are the hands. For example, the ASL sign meaning 'deaf' has the hand configured in what is called the "1 handshape", moving first to contact the cheek and then tracing a small arc to contact the face near the side of the mouth.

ASL signs can also be described in more precise detail, for example in terms of whether one or two hands are used to articulate the sign, the general location and orientation of the hands relative to each other and to the signer's body, the movement of the hands or body during the articulation of the sign, the sequence of movements, and the signer's facial expression(s). These elements are all considered important in the description of ASL signs because they help linguists to categorize the inventory of possible formative elements in ASL, in the same way that linguists find it helpful to create inventories of the consonants and vowels that are used in spoken languages.

For example, the sign meaning 'finally' is often accompanied with a facial expression that looks like a silent pronunciation of the syllable "pah!". However, comparison across many different ASL signs reveals that this particular mouth movement is only used in this particular ASL sign. In contrast, question signs like 'who' are often accompanied with furrowed eyebrows, which are used in the formation of content questions in ASL more generally. (Note, the signs below were intentionally modeled without these facial expressions, so unfortunately facial expressions are not visible here.)

Comparing signs in this way allows linguists to determine which combinations of formational elements are systematically reused across a variety of different signs in ASL, which elements are used only in certain ASL signs, and which elements do not occur in ASL at all. For example, the element referred to as the "A handshape", a closed fist with thumb extended, appears in many ASL signs, including those meaning 'every day', 'remember', and 'challenge'.

On the other hand, though British Sign Language uses a handshape with only the pinkie and ring finger extended, as in (some) British Sign Language signs meaning 'seven' and 'next week', this handshape is not found in any ASL signs. This is similar to the descriptive fact that the voiceless velar fricative [x] is used in the formation of German words like Dach (meaning 'roof'), but is not used in any (American) English words.

2.2 Fingerspelling

Another important sign resource in ASL is the fingerspelling system. Fingerspelling is a type of signing that is used to borrow English words into ASL. In ASL fingerspelling, a closed set of handshapes corresponds to each of the letters of the English alphabet, and can be used to (quite rapidly) spell out English words in ASL discourse. Note that this is why the "A handshape" discussed above is referred to as the "A handshape": it is the same handshape that represents the letter A in fingerspelling. ASL makes use of many more handshapes than those that are used in fingerspelling, but it is common for dictionaries and resource texts to list the inventory of handshape-letter correspondences as below:

Fingerspelling is ubiquitous in ASL. One study of ASL discourse (Padden and Gunsauls 2003) found that ASL signers fingerspell about 18% of their sign productions, and that nearly 70% of fingerspelled words in ASL discourse are nouns and names. Certain high-frequency fingerspelled words can also become fused into single signs. An example is the ASL sign meaning 'back', shown below:

The fingerspelled sequence B-A-C-K can be used to convey any of the meanings of the English word back in ASL, including a location, a part of the body, or direction of motion. In contrast, the restructured sign glossed 'back' is used primarily as a Verb of motion in ASL, such as coming back from a trip abroad, or getting back together after a breakup. The restructured fingerspelled sign is also articulated slightly faster, and with a larger horizontal movement than the fully fingerspelled word.

3. A Fable Retold in ASL

Here we will analyze a video that is available on the excellent ASL website Handspeak. The video is an ASL translation of the fable The North Wind and the Sun, retold by Jolanta Lapiak, an ASL storyteller and instructor. The North Wind and the Sun is often used for linguistic elicitation, and retellings of this fable all have in common that they depict a competition between two forces of nature, personified as characters: the north wind and the sun. The north wind and the sun have a disagreement about who is stronger, and agree to test their strength by seeing who can strip a wandering traveller of his cloak. The north wind blows with all his strength, but is unable to blow the traveller's cloak off of his body. The sun, however, emits warmth and light that eventually cause the traveller to remove the cloak on his own.

Even in this short ASL retelling of the fable, there are many examples of grammatical patterns that occur frequently in ASL discourse. In this section, we will quickly survey only a few of these patterns, and discuss representative examples of each. We will begin with constituent order, which is of cross-linguistic typological interest, and then discuss several morphosyntactic patterns that are more unique to ASL, particularly from an English-speaking perspective. Watch the following video, and consult this glossed document that I made (Glossed Analysis: Wind and Sun) as you read the following descriptions. Additionally, there is another linguistic analysis of this clip on the Handspeak website (https://www.handspeak.com/learn/124/). 

3.1 Constituent Order

It seems that the basic ASL sentence has Subject-Verb-Object structure. Line 6 consists of only a Subject ('sun'), a Verb ('offer'), and a direct Object ('first'; the chance to go first, the first try), and these constituents are ordered S-V-O.

In longer lines with more complex structure, we can also find examples where the Subject proceeds the Verb, and an Object follows. In Line 3, we have a Subject (the dual exclusive pronoun; 'the two of them') a Verb ('notice') and an Object ('man'), and again, these constituents are ordered S-V-O.

However, looking among the longer, more complex lines, we find that the majority of sentences do not seem to exhibit clear S-V-O structure. In part, this is because not all Verbs require an Object. In Line 9, we have five signs, and three of them are Verbs: 'person.stand', 'jacket.open', and 'hood.open'. This line has been translated into English as "The man’s jacket and hood started to open," but the content of Line 9 in ASL can be better analyzed into three clauses.

The first, [man person.stand] 'The man was standing there' has Subject-Verb word order. The second, [jacket jacket.open] 'The jacket started to open' also has Subject-Verb order. The third, [hood.back] 'The hood flew back' consists of only a Verb. This last sign reveals that, in some contexts, it is possible to say with a single ASL sign something that takes a whole sentence to convey in English.

Because ASL signs have the potential to convey so much information, it is possible to omit arguments of Verbs, and this allows ASL signers to produce many constituent orders other than S-V-O. As another example, in Line 11, we have only a string of Verbs, with no Subjects or Objects mentioned; it is clear from the context of the story, and from the form of the Verb, that the wind is blowing at the man, and so these characters are not mentioned explicitly here. In Line 12, the man is explicitly mentioned as a new Subject, but the sign 'man' is not repeated for any of the following Verbs in this line, because it is again clear from the context of the story who the Subject is. Similarly, in Line 13, we have a string of four Verbs, with the Subject omitted, and in Line 16, we again have seven Verbs and no Subject explicitly mentioned. Verbs seem to do quite a lot of work in ASL!

3.2 Repetition and Sentence-Final Constructions

Another consequence of the prominent status of Verbs in ASL is that they are often repeated within a sentence. Notice that in Line 11 and Line 12, the signer repeats several signs multiple times: "more more", "blow blow", "strong strong", and "hold.closed hold.closed". In English, these lines have been translated using a similar construction: "The wind blew again and again, stronger and stronger, and the man clutched his jacket tighter and tighter." Here we see that ASL and English both use repetition to convey how the agents in the story redouble their efforts.

Another repetition construction in ASL, one that is not found in English, involves repeating a Verb that has appeared elsewhere in the sentence at the end of the clause. These repeated Verbs serve to refocus the message on the main Verb after a brief description or elaboration. In Line 3, for example, the second instance of the sign 'person.move.forward' refocuses attention on the man's movement, after a short description of his jacket and hood.

Similarly, in Line 7, the first instance of the Verb 'move.behind' is followed by a more explicit description about the act of hiding, that it is "behind a cloud," and then 'move.behind' is repeated again. The action of "moving behind" something is understood to have happened only once, even though the 'behind' relationship is actually expressed three times (move.behind … hide behind … move.behind). Here, the form of the Verb 'move.behind' is also modified slightly the second time, now that the 'cloud' has been explicitly mentioned.

Finally, in Line 18, the two instances of 'offer' enclose the thing that is offered, namely the wind’s concession of defeat to the sun. On the second instance of the Verb 'offer', the signer’s hands are also relaxed slightly; this second instance provides no new identifiable information about the “offer”, other than to confirm that 'offer' is the main Verb of the clause.

We do not see any examples of them in the story, but other sentence-final constructions in ASL include pronoun tags, where the Subject of a clause can be repeated at the end of a clause as a pronoun (as in "1SG know ASL 1SG": 'I know ASL'), and sentence-final negation, where a negative element such as 'not' can appear at the end of a sentence to negate the entire sentence (as in "3SG.DEM story good NEG": 'That story isn’t any good').

These constructions can combine with each other, and with the ability to omit arguments in ASL, in interesting ways that we do not have space to discuss here. However, these sentence-final constructions all have in common that they treat the end of the sentence as an important position where a highly salient aspect of the discourse, such as the Subject, main Verb, or Negation, can optionally (re)appear.

3.3 Contact with English

Compared to conversational ASL, in which signers frequently code-switch and borrow English words and phrases to suit their communicative needs, the story-telling register in ASL exhibits very little English influence. For example, there are no fingerspelled English words used in this story. The only two signs in the story that can be considered borrowed from English are the signs 'OK' and 'ready', which both occur in Line 8 as a depiction of the wind's action. 'OK' is another example of a restructured fingerspelled sign; it is a frequently-occurring sign in which we can see traces of the O and K handshapes from the fingerspelled sequence O-K. The sign 'ready', on the other hand, is known as an initialized sign, because the handshape that is used to form this sign, the R handshape from fingerspelling, corresponds to the initial letter of the English word ready.

Throughout the story, we can also observe English-influenced mouthing, where the movement of the mouth evokes the movement of the mouth in pronouncing an English word. You can imagine that there might be many factors that influence the use of mouthing, for example an individual ASL signer’s familiarity with English, the translation equivalence (or lack thereof) between a given ASL sign and a given English word, the signer’s beliefs about their addressee’s language background, and the signer’s own attitude towards the relationship between ASL and English. Indeed, signers vary with respect to how much English-influenced mouthing they use. There have been some studies of English mouthing in ASL, however, there is still a lot we don’t know about the prevalence of mouthing in ASL.

3.4 Mouth Actions

In addition to English-influenced mouthing, we can also observe additional ASL mouth actions, movements of the mouth (and face) that serve an identifiable and contrastive grammatical function but cannot be attributed to ASL's contact with English.

Many of these mouth actions co-occur with Verbs, and can be said to function like Adverbs, modifying the manner of the action denoted by the Verb. For example, comparing the second and third instances of 'blow' in Line 13, we can see that in the second sign, the signer grits her teeth and spreads her lips, to indicate that the wind is exerting a lot of effort. In the third sign, the signer opens her mouth and curls her lip, conveying the wind’s exhaustion and resignation. It is likely that the forms of these mouth actions are motivated in part by how people typically move their mouths when exerting effort or conveying exhaustion, but these mouth actions have also become recurring conventional elements with modifying functions in ASL.

Similarly, in Line 16, on the second instance of the sign 'shine' (which the signer modifies so that it resembles the sign 'blow' in Line 13), the signer’s pursed lips convey that the sun’s heat is being emitted smoothly and effortlessly. This contrasts with the wind’s effortful blowing a few lines earlier.

Though it is tempting to focus only on the hands, these examples demonstrate that it is important to always pay attention to the movements of the face and of the rest of the body, in addition to the hands, when analyzing ASL discourse. The face and body are sometimes grouped together under the label non-manual markers; however, we do not use this label here because, whether intentionally or not, it has the effect of treating all of the other bodily articulators as secondary to the hands.

Another example of a facial action is glossed as '(suddenly)' at the beginning of Line 3. Here we have a sign that is articulated on the face, without its own manual component. In articulating this sign, the signer closes her mouth, swallows, and looks to the side. This facial sign serves the function of interrupting the current clause and introducing a new one.

The manual content that co-occurs with the facial sign '(suddenly)' is held over from the previous sign 'back.and.forth' at the end of Line 2. In English, this stretch of the story is translated as "as they were arguing". Both English and ASL have a mechanism for backgrounding the content of the previous clause and introducing a new idea, but the mechanisms are quite different: in English, the previous action is repeated using a separate verb, but in ASL, the form of the previous sign utterance can be carried over into the next sign.

3.5 Locations, Body-Shifting, and Directionality

This fable contains two main characters: the wind and the sun. In retelling the fable as an ASL story, the signer exploits a very robust strategy in ASL to mark these two referents in the discourse, taking advantage of the signing space around her body to show "who is doing what to whom". She associates each character with a location in her signing space, placing the sun on the right side of her body, and the wind on her left. Near the beginning of the story, the signer explicitly associates the two characters with their respective locations in space by pointing to each side of her body, and then providing a sign to associate that location with a character, as in the beginning of Line 2.

It is difficult to tell in the still frames, but the signer also subtly shifts her body and the direction of her eye-gaze to emphasize the contrast between the two characters associated with each side of her body. At the end of Line 2, the signer alternates between signing with her right and left hands and she simultaneously shifts her body from right to left, in order to highlight the contrast between the two characters’ locations and their positions in the dispute over who is stronger.

These two locations are then used systematically throughout the rest of the narrative to refer to the wind and the sun as separate characters: the signer can shift her body slightly toward the left or the right to refer to either character, with or without referring to that character with a separate sign. In Line 5, as the signer tells the wind’s response to the sun’s proposal, she shifts her body to the left, the location associated with the wind, and directs her signing to the right, the location associated with the sun. This can be seen particularly clearly with the signs 'yes' and 'fine', where the signer also directs her eyegaze to the right, toward the sun’s location, and we understand that the wind is responding to the sun.

In ASL, locations in space are not only used to encode the relative locations of discourse referents. Many verbs can also change their form to incorporate these referential locations and to reflect Verbal Argument Structure. If we compare the instance of 'offer' in Line 6 with the one in Line 14, we can see that they differ primarily in the direction they face: in Line 6, 'offer' is facing such that it moves from the location associated with the sun character toward the location associated with the wind character. In Line 14, the direction is reversed, moving from the wind's location toward the sun's. These two instances of 'offer' differ with respect to who is doing the "offering": first the sun offers something to the wind, and later the wind offers something to the sun. In both, the sign moves from the Subject to the indirect Object.

Similarly, in Lines 3 and 4, the traveller is associated with a low location on the signer’s left, and so when discussing the sun’s challenge to see who can cause the man’s jacket to open, the signer directs her eye-gaze and the movement of the Verbal signs 'notice' and 'influence' toward the location in signing space that is associated with the man. Similarly, all of the wind’s blowing and the sun’s shining in Lines 8-16 is directed toward the man’s assigned location.

The use of location and directionality (sometimes referred to as depiction) is one of the most intriguing parts of the ASL grammar. Hearing people who acquire ASL as a second language often find that they can rely on their own previous experience with co-speech gesture to quickly learn the basics of the system. However, in the acquisition of ASL, whether as a first language or as a second language, the coordinated use of space for grammatical purposes is one of the most complicated aspects of the grammar, and is typically mastered last.

Many researchers have developed projects to tease apart the relationship between the use of the body in sign language and the use of the body in non-sign gesture. However, there is still quite a bit of research to be done in this area, both at the level of clearly describing the systematic use of space and directionality in ASL, and at the level of clearly explaining the nature of the relationship between the use of space in sign languages and in the gestures produced by non-signers. At any rate, it is clear that ASL makes systematic use of location and directionality to mark grammatical distinctions, showing that, regardless of where these strategies originally came from, they have become grammaticalized as part of ASL.

4. Summary

Here we have seen a little bit about the deaf communiti(es) in the US and Canada, and learned about their language, ASL. We quickly examined how ASL signs are formed, and Jolanta Lapiak's retelling of The North Wind and the Sun provided the basis for illustrating some of the basic elements of ASL sentence structure, especially the prominent role of Verbs in ASL, and the way that Verbs systematically make use of the signer's body and the space around the signer's body to modify how events are described. Although ASL is articulated in a different modality than the more familiar spoken languages of the world, we have seen that ASL grammatically codes the types of information that one would expect from any other human language.