Sign language is a international language, that uses hand gestures and postures as well as facial expressions to communicate. Sign language is used by those who have hearing impairments. The idea behind sign language is based on the idea that vision is a crucial tool for the hearing impaired to communicate and receive information; because not all the words that are mouth are understood by the receiver. Although people mouth the words, this is important for contextual and regional words. Sign language is just like any other language and has rules for proper sentence structure. Sign language differs by region, the region I'm focusing on is North, Central, and South America. Although the concept of signing is the same, different regions have different ways of signing, not even the alphabet is the same in all of these regions. Sign language in this region is commonly referred to as American Sign Language (also known as ASL). American Sign Language does involve English words, but its a completely different language then English. ASL has all the basic components of a language such as; pronunciation rules, sentence structure, and grammar that might be regional or contextual. American Sign Language like every other language has different ways to differentiate between a statement or a question. In American Sign Language to ask a question you raise your eyebrows, widening your eyes, and tilt your body forward. Expansion on sentence structure in American Sign Language. For sentence structure the typical arrangement is a topic then a comment or commonly referred to a subject-verb pair. The only difference in ASL is
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that it doesn't matter what order you put the "topic" "comment" arrangement, it can be "comment" "topic"; as long both parts are there. Same goes for if your including a direct object as well as indirect object in a sentence, as long as the meaning is the same . You can also add a time phrase, but the phrase must go at the beginning of a sentence. When putting together a sentence, if you want to distinguish between a noun and a verb do the sign once, if the sign has two meanings. When signing to differentiate between the different tenses its typically the further away the sign is to your body lets the recipient know. So in the present tense you sign close to the body, in the past tense you sign by beginning or finishing the sign at chest level and incorporating the sign "fish" in the sentence; either in the beginning or the middle. "Fish" in this context is a shorter way of saying "finish" then in the future tense you sign away from the body but just add the sign "will" at the end of each sentence. Also to sign that you have not completed the action you sign the incomplete action and sign "not yet" at the end while slightly shaking your head. The comment expands on the topic for example if you wanted to say the "father loves the child". The topic would be "father" and the comment would be the rest of the sentence. So you would sign "father" then "love" then "child".
http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-structure-sign-sentences.html http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/American_Sign_Language/Basic_Grammar_1 http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/hearing/pages/asl.aspx |