Adverbial Morphemes in Tactile ASL - Gallaudet University

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PDE – Steven D. Collins Findings and Interpretations _________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Table 2 shows each of the adverbial types as described above. The Number of Occurrences denotes the number of times the adverbial type appeared in the videotaped session. The Percentage box shows the percentage of this particular adverbial type present among all of the adverbials. By observing the percentage, one gets a sense of the relative frequency that each of the adverbial types occurs in a prolonged conversation. It is important to note that these observations apply only to the specific conversation observed. The following chart presents this data in the form of a pie chart. Percentage of Type in All Place/Position/Direction 21% Frequency 1% Purpose 4% Duration 10% Manner/Degree 37% Duration Manner/Degree Time Frequency Place/Position/Direction Purpose Time 27% Figure 14 - Percentage of Occurrence of Types In this data three adverbial types of Manner/Degree, Time, and Place/Position/Direction accounted for the majority of occurrences. The conversation between the two subjects that resulted in this data could, very easily, have ventured into a far different subject matter. They spent a significant amount of the conversation describing “how things work”. There was a discussion about various text communication devices and devices that are used for signaling such 69
PDE – Steven D. Collins Findings and Interpretations _________________________________________________________________________________________________________ as doorbells and TTY 4 devices. As a result, there was a good deal of discussion of manner and degree of describing the performance of these devices and the positioning of these devices in the subjects respective homes. As well, there was a lengthily discussion about sports. The subjects discussed how various teams did at various points in time in the past. This produced a large number of adverbial samples of the type time. Regarding the fact that relatively few adverbs of frequency were used, it is generally acknowledged that ASL makes use of a rather rich inflectional system in which some temporal senses are marked on the verb itself rather than with a separate adverb sign. The ability of the language to encode some types of frequency in its morphology indicates that the presence of certain adverbs is either unnecessary or redundant. At least some of the aspectual markers in visual ASL involve non-manual signals as well as the manual component. The meaning carried by the non-manual signal is somewhat redundant. It does seem though, that Deaf-Blind people are also expressing redundancies. Along with the manual portion of the verb marked for frequency, there is some evidence that a specific adverb sign is also added. Due to the low incidence of such signs in the data, the addition or deletion of adverbs of frequency needs to be examined more closely. Although, this researcher does not have data to support this conclusion, there is a suspicion that any given conversation would tend to have more frequent representations of specific adverbial types depending on the topic and flow of the conversation. This conclusion acknowledges that some adverbial types would appear less frequently than others. This sample is, therefore, an accurate reflection of general tendencies to use or omit certain adverb types. That is to say, the types of adverbs that appeared less frequently in the transcribed conversation is itself an interesting point. This researcher’s intent, in future analysis, is to study in more depth the factors presented here. An important aspect that is demonstrated in this paper is the consistent pattern in the manner in which the Deaf-Blind individual incorporates one or more of the features, as summarized in Table 1, into their signing that introduces a tactile component into their conversation as a compensation for the visual NMS that they cannot observe. 4 A TTY device is a teletypwriter device that allows for a text conversation to be conducted over a telephone line. They are widely used in the deaf community. 70
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