Adverbial Morphemes in Tactile ASL - Gallaudet University

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PDE – Steven D. Collins Intellectual Context and Literature Review _________________________________________________________________________________________________________ and grammatical and discourse features of tactile ASL. Rather, the way in which adverbial nonmanual signals in visual ASL are produced manually in TASL is isolated and analyzed. Once the research is completed the learner then analyzes the data for effectiveness of the isolated morphemes and not the effectiveness of the overall piece. Upon careful examination and understanding, interpreters will then be asked to incorporate the non-manual signal information in a tactile interpretation. This research is not meant to evaluate the quality of the interpreters’ work but rather to identify if any adaptations were made to incorporate the visual information. Tactile ASL has many interesting features to analyze in terms of variation; the learner’s focus hereon is adverbials. It is a perfectly reasonable narrowing of focus. Furthermore, the analysis here focuses on features of Tactile ASL, features which are linguistic in nature. One might be tempted to characterize them as paralinguistic features but this would be incorrect. Paralinguistic features have to do with features that may accompany linguistic units but are not themselves analyzable as linguistic units. Bussman (1996: 347) states that paralinguistic factors include “particular types of articulation and phonation (breathing, murmuring, whispering, or clearing one’s throat, crying, and coughing) and intonation.” Some linguists do not consider intonation to be a paralinguistic feature and not surprisingly, no mention is made of paralinguistic factors as they pertain to sign languages. However, the features of adverbials that I am analyzing here are of a linguistic nature: they contribute directly to the creation of linguistic units that have specific meanings. The features that I am describing do not accompany linguistic units; they are themselves linguistic units, without which the desired meaning cannot be realized. 37
PDE – Steven D. Collins Methods _________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 3. Methods This Project Demonstrating Excellence (PDE) takes the form of a qualitative linguistic case study of two Deaf-Blind individuals conversing in Tactile ASL. The objective of the research was to determine the nature of adverbial use in tactile American Sign Language. A pilot study was first conducted. Two Deaf-Blind individuals were matched for sex, age, vision loss, and involvement in the Deaf and Deaf-Blind communities. A topic was provided to the subjects and the resulting conversation was videotaped. Key information regarding the logistics of collecting data was used in the main study. This included experimenting with various positions to discover optimal placement of the video cameras to ensure that the subjects could be clearly observed. For the main study, again each Deaf-Blind participant in the communicative event had Usher’s Syndrome Type I, and were also matched for sex, age, vision loss and involvement in the Deaf and Deaf-Blind communities. Both subjects were males, in their 50s, native users of ASL and have used Tactile ASL for at least 10 years. Additionally, each of the subjects had used standard ASL before they used Tactile ASL, and they regularly interact and socialize with other Deaf-Blind adults. It was important that the participants be members of this community as this research investigated adverbial variation as a sociolinguistic phenomenon. The subjects were asked to complete a consent form expressing their willingness to participate in this project. In addition, answers to the questionnaire provided important information needed for the analysis of the session. A copy of the Consent Form used is provided in Appendix E. The videotaped sessions were approximately 50 minutes in duration, producing a sample of interactive natural discourse. The range of topics that were suggested prior to taping related to oppression, life experience as a Deaf-Blind person, and a discussion stemming from their experiences related to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack. The purpose of suggesting the topic was to elicit conversation that would likely contain adverbial use. This was based on experience gained in the 1998 pilot session. Pairs of signers were used because the two signers must be in physical contact with each other. Since tactile communication is almost always oneon-one, the use of group interviews would be a marked situation and likely to skew the results. 38
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