A case study of tongue protrusion in BSL narratives
Donna Lewin | Deafness Cognition and Language (DCAL) Research Centre, University College London
Adam C. Schembri | National Institute for Deaf Studies and Sign Language, La Trobe University
This article investigates the claim that tongue protrusion (‘th’) acts as a nonmanual adverbial morpheme in British Sign Language (BSL) (Brennan 1992; Sutton-Spence & Woll 1999) drawing on narrative data produced by two deaf native signers as part of the European Cultural Heritage Online (ECHO) corpus. Data from ten BSL narratives have been analysed to observe the frequency and form of tongue protrusion. The results from this preliminary investigation indicate tongue protrusion occurs as part of the phonological formation of lexical signs (i.e., ‘echo phonology’, see Woll 2001), as well as a separate meaningful unit that co-occurs (sometimes as part of constructed action) with classifier constructions and lexical verb signs. In the latter cases, the results suggest ‘th’ sometimes appears to function as an adverbial morpheme in BSL, but with a greater variety of meanings than previously suggested in the BSL literature. One use of the adverbial appears similar to a nonmanual signal in American Sign Language described by Liddell (1980), although the form of the mouth gesture in our BSL data differs from what is reported in Liddell’s work. Thus, these findings suggest the mouth gesture ‘th’ in BSL has a broad range of functions. Some uses of tongue protrusion, however, remain difficult to categorise and further research with a larger dataset is needed.
2016. On the Conventionalization of Mouth Actions in Australian Sign Language. Language and Speech 59:1 ► pp. 3 ff.
Stamp, Rose, Adam Schembri, Bronwen G. Evans & Kearsy Cormier
2016. Regional Sign Language Varieties in Contact: Investigating Patterns of Accommodation. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 21:1 ► pp. 70 ff.
Ortega, Gerardo & Gary Morgan
2015. Input processing at first exposure to a sign language. Second Language Research 31:4 ► pp. 443 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 26 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.