Adverbial Morphemes in Tactile ASL - Gallaudet University

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PDE – Steven D. Collins Intellectual Context and Literature Review _________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Another finding in the Collins & Petronio research was in regard to discourse. When individuals are communicating with one another, certain actions provide feedback to the speaker or listener that the communication was received, understood, agreed to or disagreed with. This process of back-channeling goes through phonological assimilation when tactile ASL was used. These variations, adaptations and assimilations that Collins and Petronio describe are examples of linguistic change that has occurred and is continuing to occur in the United States Deaf-Blind community. The authors attribute these sociolinguistic changes to the expanding socialization opportunities for Deaf-Blind individuals. Through various organizations Deaf- Blind individuals who were once isolated now have opportunities to get together, communicate and make language contact changes that fit their linguistic needs. The researchers had the opportunity to discuss adverb and adjective changes in tactile ASL in the 1998 work. It was mutually agreed on by both Collins & Petronio that the pilot study was just the beginning step of a vast journey into morphemic assimilation. The pilot study determined that with certain ASL non-manual adverbials and adjectival morphemes an auxiliary muscle tension and movement were added to a specific facial configuration such as: “oo” with mouth pursed to mean thin or objects with a small size; “mm” with mouth closed in a normal way meaning regularity; ”cha” with mouth opened means objects of a big size; and “ee” with mouth widened meant caution or anxiety. This paper supports the 1998 findings and expands upon other morphemes serving the same function; however these facial configurations are not the subject of this study. 2.4.5. Deaf-Blind Interpreting Research states firmly that it is very important for interpreters to be familiar with linguistic variation. According to Frankel (2002), it is essential that an interpreter must be able to mediate the language as well as the variation that occurs when the modality changes from visual to tactile. One such communicative setting occurs when one of the interlocutors is Deaf- Blind as they have unique tactile language needs. Thus it is crucial that an interpreter adjusts their interpreting to clarify information received from non-manual signals. This paper’s research elucidates on the variation that occurs in a Deaf-Blind person’s use of non-manual signals (facial expression) that are used as adverbials. To clearly understand how 35
PDE – Steven D. Collins Intellectual Context and Literature Review _________________________________________________________________________________________________________ NMS carry into tactile American Sign Language, it is first necessary to comprehend what happens in formal TASL discourse. In the 1992 pilot study the research showed that sighted individuals adjust their language to accommodate understanding during a Deaf-Blind interaction. The same is true for nonsighted individuals. Individuals who have Usher’s Syndrome Type I communicate in their primary language, ASL, while making adaptations to fit a tactile mode. Tactile ASL has phonological, lexical, and syntactic variation, specifically concerning the representation of nonmanual signs and their location during production. Furthermore, interpreting between English and ASL, two distinct languages, is a complex cognitive process. Research done by Cokely (1996) investigated error types when interpreting between these two languages. Adding a fairly unfamiliar variation of ASL to the formula when interpreting from English complicates the matter further. Errors will continue to occur in the form of miscues in movement, handshapes, orientation, and non-manual signals. Dr. Melanie Metzger has worked as an interpreter serving the American Deaf and hearing communities. Her graduate education is in linguistics with a concentration in sociolinguistics. Her research has addressed pronoun variation, the use of space, non-manual signals, issues in language acquisition and multilingual-multicultural education including issues in data collection unique to signed language research and the analysis of interactive interpreting. According to Bridges and Metzger (1996), authors of Deaf Tend Your: Non-Manual Signals in American Sign Language, the misuse of non-manual signals by non-native speakers clearly identifies them as much less fluent users of the language. 2.5. Scope While it would be vastly beneficial to develop a curriculum for Deaf-Blind interpreting, that is outside of the scope of this research project. Before a language can truly be taught to nonnative speakers, the language must first be understood in its linguistic and sociolinguistic contexts. Tactile ASL has yet to be examined to the degree necessary for that to happen. The current work is one of the preliminary steps to understanding the language used by members of the Deaf-Blind community. This paper expands upon the initial work of Collins and Petronio (1998). However, the paper does not examine all of the phonological, morphological, syntactic, 36
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