Words in Hand

Well, maybe you remember on the last tape, we talked about how signs can give information about the size and shape of something, or how we hold things. There are many examples in 'Football Crazy'.

Look at Gerry's sign for 'goal'. It is a clear shape, showing the goalposts and the space in between. When he tells us about the player lying on the ground injured, this classifier represents the legs, showing the legs on the ground. The player couldn't get up, and we use the same classifier to show this.

When Gerry talks about the two men bringing out a stretcher, his signing shows how they hold the stretcher. Now, you probably noticed that as well as showing the stretcher, it gives us a close up. Do you remember when we talked about this? It's a close up of how people are carried off.

It also shows us the distance of one man walking behind the other. Now we have two handshapes, and it's really important because we often say that this handshape shows a person. It's a 'person' classifier. So if we have two such classifiers, moving, it shows one person walking behind the other.

The other sign – or classifier – which you probably noticed on the tape, is the classifier for 'people'. Instead of one person, we have many people. So we use both hands to show many people in different ways. Remember how we watched the ball go flying above the goal? Remember seeing this sign? Our hands become the people. If we think about what is happening then, the sign chosen to be used was flexible.

If you look at the whole 'Football Crazy' story, you can see lots of variations in the way the 'people' classifier is used. It shows the crowd watching the football match. It shows the footballers walking out onto the pitch. And the crowd watching the players and the ball going up and down the pitch.

When we talk about those extracts, and when a sign talks about people, we use this handshape. The sign can vary the information by changing the movement and adding extra information from your face. If we look at one extra example in 'Football Crazy'… if you ask someone for a football, the sign will show you the actual ball.

But in 'Football Crazy', Gerry uses two other handshapes. He used this sign, for example, when the players do a header or are hit on the head. We can't use the two handed sign for football here. So this classifier works.

At other times, he decided to use the pointer finger to show the way, the direction, of the ball. So if the ball is kicked up, this sign is used. The fist handshape isn't used, because it's showing the direction. Here's some examples. And it can show balls going past a player – we don't use our fists for that because we are showing the speed of the ball.

What we begin to find in BSL is that we have signs that are a little bit like what we call 'pronouns' in relation to English, or 'proforms'. We use proforms because it's not only nouns we're talking about. What are proforms in BSL? A pronoun is a form that can be substituted for a noun or another item. In BSL, what happens is a sign can be substituted for another sign to show that, to reverse, and show that item instead.

So instead of always using this sign for ball, we can actually use different handshapes to show it is a round object. It's a ball. What happens is the context tells us exactly what it is. In some ways, BSL is giving us more information than English does in the same situation. In English you might say 'it' and it could be anything. 'It went up the hill.' It could be a castle that is 'it' or a ball is 'it' or an airplane is 'it'. We know what 'it' is because of context.

In BSL we also know what the handshape represents, because of context. Because it's round and solid.

There are many other classifiers like that. We've already seen an important one in an earlier tape that was different vehicles and so on and its classifier. When Clive was talking about the motorbike – do you remember the joke? Instead of constantly using this sign for motorbike, he showed us a different sign. This classifier represented the motorbike. Do you notice how easy and flexible it is when we replace this sign with a classifier?

You might remember in Bear Hunt, Clark was talking about the hat and getting out of the car. It shows the hunter getting out of the car. So if you watch the next bit of the tape, you will find many different examples of classifiers. Look especially for vehicles – which could look like this – the person classifier and the different people classifiers.

Look out for ways of signing handles and grasping objects. It gives us a clue as to what we are talking about. There is a long extract of a story Clive tells about a trip to Italy. It's an exciting trip and you may be able to work out what happens at the end.