Adverbial Morphemes in Tactile ASL - Gallaudet University

PDE – Steven D. Collins
Findings and Interpretations
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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.
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