The presence of absence

Mary Chapin Carpenter says in her despairing song, "It wasn't what you said; it's what you didn't say". In sign language poetry, Michiko Kaneko and I are starting to understand how much poetic meaning comes from referents that aren't shown.

We have been thinking about two examples: The tree in Paul Scott's poem Tree and the knife blade in Johanna Mesch's Party.  Both can be seen at www.bristol.ac.uk/bslpoetryanthology

In Tree, Paul does sign TREE when the seedling grows, but after that the hand that signed TREE shows the ground in which the tree grows.  All sorts of actions occur as people, animals and objects make contact with the tree, even though the tree in not shown. The tree's presence is very strong, and perhaps all the stronger because it isn't there. The illusion is so powerful that I wrote several paragraphs once for a research paper, in which I carefully described the hand showing the tree, before going back for another look and finding the tree wasn't there.  Michiko is quite right when she says that the illusion comes in no small part from the use of the gaze.  Because Paul's eyes are fixed on where the tree should be, we accept that it is there.

Johanna's Party turns on the absence of the presence.  We see the woman holding the knife as she slices the food, through a sign with a handling classifier showing how she handles the knife.  On her other hand she shows a different handling classifier showing how one holds food of that size, shape and consistency (bread, perhaps?). It is clear from the use of space that she is slicing something held by that hand, and that the knife blade is extending from the handle she holds.  Considering how easily we accept this, it is actually quite an extraordinary feat of mental agility.  We simply know that the blade of the knife is there.  But Johanna uses our mental agility against us as we get complacent and simply see what we want to see.  When the woman plunges the hand holding the knife into her chest we naturally assume from the context (the argument with her fiance or husband) that the blade is pointing towards her chest and she aims to commit suicide.  Only alert viewers will notice that she has not turned her hand around.  She rams the knife's handle firmly against her chest but the unseen, absent blade that ought to be so present, is actually pointing away from the body.  Watch it.  It's a classic.

The trick would be impossible in English.

Both poems rely on sign language's  use of empty space to create the poetic effect.

What's the point of knowing what Deaf teachers would do?

I've been working with Deaf teachers recently, learning from them how they work with deaf children, using signed stories in the classroom.  Time and again it comes clear that they know things, can do things, and understand things that can help educate the deaf children in a way that hearing teachers don't seem to be able to do - or at least not so well.

I published the findings with Claire Ramsey at UCSD in the Journal of Deafness and Education International and it seems to have been taken as a wake-up call for better training for hearing people who want to teach deaf children. It is.  Hearing teachers need as much training as possible to help them teach deaf children much better than they can now.  But, even more, it needs to be a wake-up call for better training for deaf people who want to teach deaf children.  Here is the most extraordinary resource that is horribly under-used because of the lack of training.  My friend Paul pointed this out in no uncertain terms.  Thanks Paul.

i-phone

I have been discussing language change and borrowing with my students and we started talking about signs for the i-phone.

Here are some of the signs people came up with (the last one is for the i-pad so it just shows the distinction between the i-phone and the i-pad):

Loans from either English or ASL don't work well.

A direct English calque of "i" plus "phone" works well enough for anyone who is happy to back-translate but visually it doesn't work at all.  I think part of this is because the sign TELEPHONE is old enough to come from the time when it was something hearing people used.  TELEPHONEs are things you put to your ear.  Sure, i-phones can be put to your ear (not that ones sees it that often) but for members of the Deaf commnity the i-phone has no history of being a telephone. It carries none of the baggage of being a barrier to the world of hearing people.  The word 'phone' and the sign TELEPHONE are almost coincidentally linked to the i-phone.

Then there's the 'i' bit.  We can discount wordplay like EYE+PHONE, despite the wide open phonological niche where it could comfortably sit.  There is a proud pedigree of BSL compounds where the first sign is SEE - SEE+MAYBE =CHECK, SEE+NEVER = STRANGE, SEE+SHOW = EXHIBITION, SEE+CATCH = DISCOVER and SEE+SWEAR-THE-TRUTH =WITNESS as just a few examples (there are plenty more in the BSL-English dictionary).  And they all move away from the head and downwards, so that makes the perfect model for EYE+PHONE.  But it's too clever by half.  I+PHONE uses a closer letter-to-meaning link with the 'I' but that won't work as a compound because it moves upwards and in towards the head, and anyway it looks like a verb phrase "I phone [somebody]".

Most prosaically and functionally, then, if we want a calque we can simply fingerspell the -i- and then use PHONE.  Again there is a linguistic niche open as wide as the sky (that's a Dot Miles allusion - watch her poem The Cat) for a manual letter and a sign to create BSL calques from English. We only have to think of -c-WALL (Cornwall), -c-WELL (Camberwell), CAT-f- (Catford) and –c-BRIDGE (Cambridge).  It's all right, but no better than all right.


Maybe the ASL loan could help.  We have a history of borrowing from other sign languages, including ASL, and sometimes we don't even notice it.  Take the sign TREE that most BSL signers today would use.  Not many are aware that it's a loan from ASL. But for the i-phone there's a major clash because the ASL manual letter corresponding to the letter 'i' uses the same handshape as the BSL morpho-phoneme 'bad'.  Thus, instead of a sign that looks like a foreign sign for an i-phone we have a sign that looks like a native sign for a bad phone.


So we give up on loans from any other language and look to a visually motivated sign that doesn't even acknowledge that the i-phone is a telephone.  Why would it, when Deaf people don't use it as a phone anyway?  It is phonologically appropriate; the non-dominant base hand is a flat B hand and doesn't move.  It might be more "visual" if the handshape were a handling classifier to show how one holds an i-phone, but that would be against Battison's dominance and symmetry constraints. So, instead, the handshape is an entity classifier focusing on the flatness of the i-phone.  There is something deliciously elegant about using the open-8 handshape for the dominant hand. A 5 or 1 handshape (or G handshape for old fogeys like me) would do and maybe even be more visually accurate, but would have none of the charm of the open-8.  


How can you not love this language?

(And from what I can make out, the only difference between the signs for an i-phone and an i-pad are in the size of movement)