Words in Hand

Well, was that any easier this time? Perhaps you're beginning to be able to read the fingerspelling and understand George's signs? I think there's one thing you might have noticed from that piece of tape and that is, that it's really a little bit artificial for us to talk all the time about signs as if they were only involving the hands, because we're clearly getting a lot of meaning from the signer's face and his body. Well, it's certainly important to look at what the face and the body are doing, particularly the face. What we've found so far, in looking at British sign language, is that the face tends to give us extra information. It's information that is either grammatical, or is giving extra emphasis to a particular sign. There's not so many signs that actually have a facial expression or feature included, say a mouth shape as part of the sign itself. But there are some and it's important to recognise them.

In the next piece of tape that we're going to show you now, you'll see a sign that occurs very often in BSL and one that we're going to talk about later in the series. It's the sign (SIGNS). Very often it means something like 'There is' or 'There was'. But what we want you to notice at the moment is the mouth shape that goes with this sign. It's a little bit like the mouth shape we use for 'S-H' or 'Shush' and it's normally part of the sign. A similar mouth shape is also used in the sign for A-B-O-U-T T-O or G-O-I-N-G T-O and you've probably seen that sign already in several of the extracts (signs). There's one other very important part to notice and that's really we're pretending that all signs are made in what we call their 'Citation form'. Imagine if you were looking in the dictionary for an English word. The pronunciation of that word that you'll find in the dictionary is what we might think of as the 'Ah, we must say it that way' that's the Citation Form. But when we actually use that word, if we're talking with other people, then the pronunciation can be changed. Now the same thing happens in BSL. Sometimes the position is slightly different, you might get the sign for DEAF but it's given so that it doesn't touch the ear, DEAF or DEAF. Or KNOW or KNOW so that the thumb isn't actually touching the head, but we know what it means because of the context. The other point is that signs can be modified. They can be made larger, smaller, (with) more intensity and they depend on the extra information that the signer wants to give. So again in later tapes we'll be looking for those modifications. In this tape we've been concentrating on the Citation Forms and picking out examples in the extracts that are not really modified or maybe slightly modified.

So now we're going to leave you with another little story, but this time from Gerry and I think you'll see many of the signs that we found in earlier tapes and also some new ones. I hope you enjoy Gerry talking about his favorite subject. Bye for now.