Mary Rose, Stanford University
Many signs in ASL (and other signed languages) require two hands. In
discourse, however, they are often pronounced with just one hand.
One-handed variants often occur while one hand holds the final segment
of
a sign, or 'perseverates', and the other continues signing the utterance.
This talk will focus on perseveration that helps to structure signed
discourse, what I am calling discourse perseveration, or DP. In DP,
the
perseverated sign serves as a reminder of its referent, a 'conceptual
landmark' for the ongoing discourse (Liddell, in press; Dudis 2002).
This
requires the signer to pronounce two signs at once, but this demand
must
fundamentally change the shape of two-handed signs in the utterance.
The
talk will introduce the phonetics of DP by outlining which features
of
either of the two simultaneously produced signs adapt to the situation.
I
will describe how the handshapes, places of articulation, palm
orientation, and movements of either sign varies in DP from its usual
form. In some two-handed words, the articulators are mirror images
of each
other, so when they get pronounced with just one hand they lose only
the
redundancy encoded in the second hand's features. Not all two-handed
signs
can adapt so easily, however, because the hands do not always exactly
mirror each other. For example, if the two-handed sign requires contact
between the two hands, that contact is usually preserved in discourse
perseveration, but at the same time it is manipulated so that the
perseverating hand can keep doing its job. It is not only the two-handed
sign that changes its handshape, movement or location, but those features
of the perseverated sign may also change. Discourse perseveration,
then,
causes a complex interaction between two signs that are essentially
being
pronounced at the same time, yet must be made intelligible to the
interlocutor as instances of their respective lexemes. I will briefly
give
some background on ASL phonology and the structure of two-handed signs
and
then explain the spatial aspects of ASL discourse strategies that
establish the context for discourse perseveration. I then turn to the
phonetic details of DP, laying out what features of each sign can or
cannot change to allow for the simultaneous production of the other.
In
general, the interaction places quite strict constraints on the phonetics
of the perseverating hand, while the two-handed sign is relatively
phonetically 'flexible', so that it is sometimes articulated radically
differently from its citation form to allow the perseveration to continue