Sign Language Studies

Sign Language Studies 30 FORMAL DEVICES FOR CREATING NEW SIGNS IN AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE Ursula Bellugi Don Newkirk Introduction How is a new word coined? Languages fill lexical gaps in various ways. Sometimes a new word is coined from the inventory of the phonemic system, as in names for products such as Quisp, Kao, or Kodak. Sometimes a word is an acronym or an abbreviation, as in Wasp for 'white Anglo-Saxon Protestant or Ufo for 'unidentified flying object'. Sometimes a word is borrowed from another language, as in klutz from Yiddish, discotheque from French, or aikido from Japanese. New words are also coined by making use of the lexical items that are part of the language and extending them in various ways. Sometimes new words are coined by combining two existing lexical roots into a compound, as in hot pants or Jet lag. Lexical items that are already part of the vocabulary of a language may be re-used with extended or figurative meaning: the word croak originally meant a deep hoarse sound like that made by a frog. It has come to mean 'to speak in a dismal accent', 'to talk despondently', and even in slang 'to die'. Finally, words in the lexicon may be built up through regular derivational processes. For instance, the word nation can be the basis for forming the words national, international, nationalize, and nationalization. New words in a language, then, are coined by external means (by borrowing from other languages) and by internal means (by creating or deriving new words from permissable sound combinations, compounding, and morphological processes). American Sign Language (ASL), the language developed within the American Deaf Community, exists within the context 0 1981, Linstok Press, Inc. 0302-1475 81:30: 1 $2.50 Sign Language Studies 30 of the surrounding hearing community. It exists as an unwritten language within the context of a language with a long and well-documented history for which generations of scholars have labored to produce large dictionaries. When we first began our studies, we read that sign language is "a collection of vague and loosely defined pictorial gestures;" and that it is pantomime; that it is "much too concrete, too broken in pieces;" that "sign language deals mainly with material objects, dreads and avoids the abstract;" that "sign language has disadvantages, especially those of grammatical disorder, illogical systems, and linguistic confusion;" that sign language "has no grammar;" that it is a "universal" communication; that it is "derived from English, a pidgin form of English on the hands with no structure of its own. " A widely prevalent view is that the vocabulary of ASL is limited; some estimates put the upper bound at 5,000 signs. There have been numerous attempts to expand the vocabulary and standardize it. These attempts have uniformly failed to consider the inherent formal mechanisms within the language system itself whereby the vocabulary of ASL is constantly expanded by its users. The kind of evidence that is accumulating with regard to American Sign Language in research laboratories around the country requires a complete revision of these archaic views. (See papers in this journal, and Stokoe et al. 1965, Siple 1978, Bellugi & Klima 1979, Klima & Bellugi 1979, Baker & Cokely 1980, Bellugi & Studdert-Kennedy 1980, Stokoe 1980.) This paper will bring evidence to bear that the vocabulary of ASL is far richer than has been claimed or documented to date, and will outline some of the formal devices provided by the language. To understand the ways in which the lexicon of ASL is expanded and is expandable, we have examined ASL signs that have been coined recently (within the last generation of deaf signers), as well as some nonce signs invented by deaf signers in our laboratory. The signs we will describe here include: a. Elicited signs for recently invented objects or ideas. We used a set of pictures of newly invented objects that had, as far as we knew, no commonly accepted older signs. Included were pictures of a hang-glider, a microwave oven, a moped, a Polaroid camera, TV ping-pong, a video cassette, etc. We also used a list of relatively recent inventions, concepts, and ideas, such as transsexual , body-scanner, computer...