Identifying motivations for distribution of nonmanual negation in ASL
To be presented in English
Negation in signed languages can be expressed manually (with a manual negative sign or a
morpheme) or nonmanually (with head movements and/or negative facial expressions).1,2,3 Sign languages
differ with respect to whether nonmanual negation can be the only marker of negation in a clause or
whether manual negation is required. It has been observed that a negative headshake alone is sufficient to
negate a predicate in ASL.4,5,6 However, this negation strategy (here ‘headshake-only negation’) may not
be available for all predicates in ASL. Here, I investigate a small group of frequently used predicates that
undergo ‘negative incorporation’,7 namely WANT, LIKE, and KNOW. Unlike other predicates in ASL,
these predicates are typically negated by reversing the orientation of the hand[s] in a twisting
outward/downward movement. Similar predicates have been proposed for unrelated sign languages.3 This
analysis examines whether headshake-only negation is a grammatical alternative to the use of negative
incorporation predicates WANT-neg, LIKE-neg and KNOW-neg in ASL or if there are linguistic
constraints on the distribution of these two strategies.
To elicit the data, I designed a structured data collection procedure in the form of a production
task and the elicitation of acceptability judgments. Five native deaf ASL signers, ranging in age from 23
to 44 years, participated in a one-on-one interview session with the interviewer, a deaf native signer of
ASL. Each session consisted of a participant’s responses to elicitation materials followed by a discussion
of these responses and possible alternatives. Elicitation materials consisted of video clips showing a deaf
native ASL signer producing a sentence containing one of the investigated predicates (1) or some other
predicate that served as a distractor (2). There were six test sentences for each investigated predicate. The
participants were asked to change the sentence in each video clip to a negative one (the interviewer asked,
for instance, one or more of the questions in (3)). If the participant’s response did not use headshake-only
negation, the interviewer would herself offer a sentence with this negation type (4) and ask whether the
participant thought that this was an acceptable ASL sentence.
None of the five participants used headshake-only negation with WANT and KNOW and each
rejected it as a possible alternative. For LIKE, four participants rejected this strategy. One participant
admitted LIKE with a headshake as an option for three of the six sentences, but also noted that this option
is not used often. The participants indicated that negation with a headshake was confusing, and the
combination of the head and hand movements felt wrong. In this paper, I consider phonological,
morphological, syntactic and semantic factors that could explain these results. In particular, I examine the
possibility of phonological constraints on making repeated contact with a turning head and on
simultaneous production of a side-to-side movement of the head and the movement of the hands towards
the torso, the effect of word order, and the meaning expressed by headshake-only negation. In addition, I
discuss the role of frequency and saliency of these predicates in human interactions.
(1) [GIRL]top WANT ICE-CREAM
‘The girl wants some ice-cream.’
(2) [SISTER]top CLIMB MOUNTAIN
‘My sister climbs mountains.’
(3) a. CHANGE NEGATIVE [HOW]whq
b. BECOME NEGATIVE [HOW]whq
c. MAKE NEGATIVE (SENTENCE) [HOW]whq
(4) * [GIRL]top [WANT ICE-CREAM]neg
References:
1. Liddell, S. K. (1980). American Sign Language Syntax. The Hague: Mouton.
2. Baker, C., & Cokely, D. (1980). American Sign Language. Clerc Books. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University
Press.
3. Zeshan, U. (2004). Hand, head and face: Negative constructions in sign languages. Linguistic Typology, 8, 1-58.
4. Baker, C. & Padden, C. A. (1978). Focusing on the nonmanual components of American Sign Language. In P. Siple
(Ed.), Understanding Language through Sign Language Research, 27–58. New York: Academic Press.
5. Veinberg, C. S., & Wilbur, R. B. (1990). A linguistic analysis of the negative headshake in American Sign Language.
Sign Language Studies, 68, 217-244.
6. Anderson, D. E., & Reilly, J. S. (1997). The puzzle of negation: How children move from communicative to
grammatical negation in ASL. Applied Psycholinguistics, 18, 411-429.
7. Woodward, J. C. (1973). Implicational lects on the Deaf diglossic continuum. Ph.D. thesis, Georgetown University.