Sign Language Structure
Stokoe, Jr.
tip of the middle finger can thus be used for contact sigs in a way the more nearly y-like allocher
cannot.
2.7. The choice to analyze the phenomena just discussed as the result of compounding and
contractive tendencies or processes to some extent rules out the treatment of such partials as the
touched or grazed upper face and lower face tabs as prefix morphemes which simply add the
motion ‘male’ or ‘female’ respectively to a base morpheme. The treatment of the cheremes in the
compound-contractions already examined is too various, and there are not anywhere near enough
other evidences of a prefix-base structure.
However, the contrast between brow and lower cheek, tabs for so many signs which have
‘man’ and ‘woman’ as part of their semantic content, is enough to make two distinct signs for
‘cousin’ in the language. The dez is C, the hand a little more in pronation than for spelling c. The
sig is @, a small circular motion, with or without slight contact with tab. This dez and sig at the
brow and at the cheek or jaw make respectively ‘male-cousin’ and ‘female-cousin’. ‘Nephew’ and
‘niece’ use the same sig and the same two tabs, but their dez is H v , the n of the manual alphabet.
2.8. Before discussing the fairly large class of initial-dez signs, of which the foregoing are
examples, a few remarks may be made in summary. Morphophonemic change such as the English
word ‘knife’ shows, the final phoneme appearing as /f/ or /v/ according to morphemic structuring,
has a counterpart in sign language; the M-dez of ‘man’ and ‘brother’ becoming the 5-dez of ‘father’
and ‘grandfather’. Likewise the c-tab of ‘woman’ becomes the l-tab of ‘lady’. Prefix morphemes
are not a fixture of the morpheme pattern, but compounding and contraction with concomitant
morphocheremic change of several kinds are. Only one true suffix appears to operate; it is almost
precisely analogous to the agentive suffix /- ə̆ r/ in English.
The sign for ‘body’ is made by dropping the flat or bent hands down along the sides of the
body: tab [, double dez BB or MM, and sig v or â . The signs for ‘individual’ and ‘person’ are
similar: BB v , and KK v or KK n ; made a little out from the body, they may be taken as zero tab signs.
The suffix sign, which will make ‘teacher’ of ‘teach’, ‘student’ of ‘learn’, ‘cook’, n. of ‘cook’, v.,
etc. is perhaps more nearly the zero-tab, BB v , but rapid signing and individual differences
(allocheric as well as stylistic) make it hard to determine whether the suffix signed alone would be
the sign for ‘individual’ or ‘body’. Some of the manuals describe the agent-noun as signed by base
sign plus ‘body sign’. It seems likely that this sign, of French origin, may have developed into two
by exploiting the trunk-zero tab contrast. For what it is worth, the jesting comment of an informant
may be added. He chided the writer for being introverted because he made the suffix sign with M-
dez instead of B.
2.9. The use of a configuration for the initial letter of the word which most often translates
the sign is a clear indication of a borrowing by the sign language from another language, but it
cannot be taken as an indication of date. As noted (2.62) the French sign vocabulary of the
nineteenth century used this principle for color signs, and l’Épée’s and Sicard’s methods, using
both ‘natural’ signs and hand alphabet led to other ‘initialed-signs’. Sometimes the change from a
French to an English environment brought a systematic revision: V-dez to G-dez for ‘green’, etc.
However, the dez of the sign now in use may preserve a forgotten French borrowing: ‘stupid;
uA , perhaps for ‘asine’.
The important points about this kind of sign formation, borrowing, or coinage are 1) that it
does not argue a simple subordination of the one language to the other as the hand alphabet is
subordinate to the graphemic system; 2) that a sign formed in this way may often be one of a group
SASLJ, Vol. 2, No. 2 – Fall/Winter 2018
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