Words in Hand

Hello again. Can you remember last time we were talking about how British Sign Language gives information about location? Today we are going to talk about how BSL gives information about time. In fact, those two areas – time and location – are related in some ways because BSL makes use of space and positions in space to give specific information about time. We will be exploring some of the ways that happens today.

Firstly, I want to say that there are both similarities and differences in the way English gives information about time and the way BSL gives information about time. Both languages make use of what we might think of as 'expressions of time'. Sometimes in English we call them 'adverbials of time' because they tell us when an action took place. We have things like: tomorrow, yesterday, two weeks ago and a long time ago. BSL uses expressions of time like that and often we can get several pieces of information about time in one sentence or one piece of BSL signing.

The biggest difference between BSL and English is that in English we change the form of the verb so that we can show past tense. So with regular verbs of English, we can add 'ed'. So we can say 'I walked' and the 'ed' shows it is past tense. In BSL we found that the way the verb is only changes in a few examples. Let me show you some.

We have examples like:

• The past tense of 'win' becomes 'won'.
• The past tense of 'leave' becomes 'left'.
• The past tense of 'say becomes 'said'.
• The past tense of 'go' becomes 'went'.
• The past tense of 'see' becomes 'saw'.

Now, there may be other examples that we haven't found yet. Even if there are, we know that there are only a few examples compared to the large number of verbs in the language, so BSL must depend on other means to give information about time.

Before we start explaining this a bit more, we will show you a piece of tape which again you might find a little bit difficult. Try to see if you can notice how Clark presents information about time in this short piece of tape about standing stones.