Linguistics: Phonology

Every language has a phonological grammar that accomplishes fundamental tasks that organize the forms within it, and all native users of a signed or a spoken language know these things without being explicitly taught them. The principles of the organization of phonology are the same in signed and spoken languages, but the way that they are realized or expressed is different in some cases, due to the different modality or channel of communication used. In sign language, this is visual/gestural, and in spoken languages, it is auditory/vocal. Just as in spoken languages, sign language phonology is concerned with the meaningless units (segments, syllables, features) of a linguistic system and how they combine via a set of rules or constraints to form meaningful units (morphemes, words, clauses).

Over 50 years of research, beginning with William Stokoe’s work in 1960, have shown that the sign language dimensions of handshape, movement, place of articulation (sometimes called location), orientation, and nonmanual behaviors (properties of the hands, arms, face, and body) function quite similarly to their corresponding spoken language properties of place of articulation, manner, and voicing produced by the tongue, lips, vocal cords, and velum. Consider the “citation” or “dictionary” form of the sign INFORM (Figure 1). The handshape includes all of the fingers bent at the knuckle joint, and the fingertips are touching the forehead, the place of articulation. The movement indicates the direction of the movement—away from the signer’s forehead. The fact that such a description is readily available might mistakenly cause us to conclude that most of the work needed to understand sign language phonology is already complete, but this is not at all the case. Knowing what the articulators are and how they move is just the beginning. The arms, hands, and body are used in many different ways in sign languages, and not all of them are phonological. In this entry we will address four main themes: (1) how to distinguish what is phonological from what is morphological on the one hand and from what is phonetic on the other, (2) the major units in sign language phonology, (3) how rules and constraints do their work, and (4) what it means to have phonological knowledge in a sign language. The units discussed will be signs (lexical units) and units smaller than that (sublexical units). The sign INFORM in Figure 1 will serve as a concrete reference point for some of these topics.

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Figure 1 The ASL Sign INFORM With Its Phonological Description for Handshape, Movement, and Place of Articulation

Source: Image reprinted by permission of The MIT Press, A Prosodic Model of Sign Language Phonology