Mouth gestures in British Sign Language

Abstract

This article investigates the claim that tongue protrusion ('th') acts as a nonmanual adverbial morpheme in British Sign Language (BSL) (Brennan 1992; SuttonSpence & Woll 1999) drawing on narrative data produced by two deaf native signers as part of the European Cultural Heritage Online (ECHO) corpus. Data from ten BSL narratives have been analysed to observe the frequency and form of tongue protrusion. The results from this preliminary investigation indicate tongue protrusion occurs as part of the phonological formation of lexical signs (i.e., 'echo phonology' , see Woll 2001), as well as a separate meaningful unit that co-occurs (sometimes as part of constructed action) with classifier constructions and lexical verb signs. In the latter cases, the results suggest 'th' sometimes appears to function as an adverbial morpheme in BSL, but with a greater variety of meanings than previously suggested in the BSL literature. One use of the adverbial appears similar to a nonmanual signal in American Sign Language described by Liddell (1980), although the form of the mouth gesture in our BSL data differs from what is reported in Liddell's work. Thus, these findings suggest the mouth gesture 'th' in BSL has a broad range of functions. Some uses of tongue protrusion, however, remain difficult to categorise and further research with a larger dataset is needed.

The ubiquity of mouthings in NGT: A corpus study

“…While the use of oral adverbials has been well-described for languages like ASL (e.g. Liddell, 1980) and recently for BSL (Lewin & Schembri, 2011), the alternate use of mouthings and mouth gestures accompanying nouns and adjectives is a new finding that demands further investigation. While some of the adjectives in our study might be analysed as adjectival predicates, at first sight, a verbal function does not appear to apply to the noun GROUP in NGT.…”

Expanding Echo: Coordinated Head Articulations as Nonmanual Enhancements in Sign Language Phonology

“…If echoes are involuntary motor couplings of two or more articulators, we would expect them to be obligatory and far more widespread than they are, but if they serve linguistic purposes such as enhancing the phonetic signal, there is no reason to assume that echoes are obligatory components of signs. In fact, some scholars suggest that optional mouth articulations are, indeed, echoes; Lewin and Schembri (2011) characterize British SL FALSE and NOTHING as having optional echoes, and Fontana (2008) claims an optional mouth echo for Italian SL DO-NOT-REALIZE. Further, a note on iconicity is necessary. Woll distinguishes echo articulations from enactments, in which the nonmanual action corresponds to a part of the denotation of the sign.…”

Use and acquisition of mouth actions in L2 sign language learners

“…Earlier studies, including studies on STS, have suggested that mouthing appears with nouns or noun phrases, "uninflected" verb forms, open-class items, and "morphologically simple" signs (Bergman & Wallin 2001;Crasborn et al 2008;Lewin & Schembri 2011). Given this background, and since STSC-L2 includes annotations for grammatical class, we present some frequency and distribution data for this analysis based on those mouthings which are used most frequently (i.e., M-type, ME-type).…”