Visual intonation in the prosody of a sign language.

Abstract

While visual signals that accompany spoken language serve to augment the communicative message, the same visual ingredients form the substance of the linguistic system in sign languages. This article provides an analysis of visual signals that comprise part of the intonational system of a sign language. The system is conveyed mainly by particular actions of the upper face, and is shown to pattern linguistically and predictably in Israeli Sign Language. Its components, aligned with prosodic constituents, are associated with particular but general meanings and may be combined to derive complex meanings. The Brow Raise component is functionally comparable to H tones, signaling continuation and dependency, and characterizing yes/no questions and the if-clause of conditionals, for example. The component Squint instructs the addressee to retrieve information that is not readily accessible, and characterizes relative clauses, topics, and other structures. The details of the componential analysis proposed here explain why the two components together co-occur on such seemingly diverse structures as yes/no questions about mutually retrievable information and counterfactual conditionals. Like auditorily perceived intonational melodies, the visual intonational arrays in sign language provide a subtle, intricately structured, and meaningful accompaniment to the words and sentences of language.

Key words

componential structure

intonation sign language

1 Introduction

Recent decades have seen an increased awareness of the fact that linguistic communication is not limited to the oral-aural channel. Visually perceived gestures of the hands, face, and body have been brought into the purview of research on spoken language, and some of these nonverbal communicative behaviors constitute what is sometimes referred to as visual prosody, the topic of this special issue of Language and Speech. In sign languages, languages that are transmitted entirely in the visual modality, the same visual signals are organized into a constrained linguistic system, a system that shares certain key features with the prosody of spoken languages (e.g., Wilbur, 1991, 2000, for American Sign Language; Nespor & Sandler, 1999, and Sandler, 1999a, 1999b, for Israeli Sign Language; van der Kooij, Crasborn, & Emmerik, 2006, for Sign Language of the Netherlands). Sign languages have conventionalized ways of (1) dividing utterances into prosodic constituents; (2) making signs more or less prominent; and (3) conveying intonational "tunes," tunes that are seen and not heard. Since the linguistic prosodic system of sign languages is constructed from the same raw ingredients available to speakers, studying the functions and patterning of sign language prosody can inform the investigation of the visual signals that accompany spoken language communication. Here we take a closer look at the intonational part of the prosodic system in one sign language, Israeli Sign Language (ISL). (1) We demonstrate that specific actions of the upper face, actions that also occur, if idiosyncratically, on the faces of speakers, comprise part of the linguistic intonational system in this language.