Clayton Valli, Ceil Lucas,
and Kristin J. Mulrooney

Part Three: Morphology and Syntax

Unit 4
Lexicalized Fingerspelling and Loan Signs

Fingerspelling

ASL creates new signs in a third way—by representing the symbols of written English with ASL signs. This process is commonly referred to as fingerspelling (see Table 5). We will refer to these signs as fingerspelled signs. In the examples discussed in this unit, the symbol # placed before a gloss indicates that the sign is fingerspelled.

Robbin Battison, an ASL linguist, did the first research on fingerspelling in ASL. He noticed, among many things, that when a written English word is represented with ASL signs, different changes may take place. It is important to notice that what have traditionally been called the “letters” of fingerspelling are ASL signs, each with a segmental structure and a handshape, location, and orientation. It is true that the handshapes of the signs may resemble the written symbol and it is true that fingerspelling in ASL is the direct result of language contact with English. For example, the handshape of the sign C may look like the written English symbol C, but the sign is a sign and not a letter.

From a morphological perspective, these signs are free morphemes. A signer may produce each morpheme distinctly in what we will call full fingerspelling. This is represented with dashes, as in w-h-a-t (see Figure 23). In actual production, however, changes often take place when fingerspelling morphemes are produced in sequence. A number of separate morphemes may begin to act like one single morpheme, like a single sign. This what we refer to as lexicalized fingerspelling, and we use the symbol # to mark it, as in Figure 23. Eight of the changes that are part of the lexicalization process are described in the following section. These changes were first described by Battison (1978).

Some of the Signs May Be Deleted

In the fingerspelling of #yes, there is a sign Y and a sign S; there is no sign E. While there are signs in ASL with one handshape or two handshapes in sequence, there are no signs with more than two handshapes in sequence. However, many fingerspelled signs start out with four or more handshapes (for example, #back, #rare, #sure, #what, and #early). It seems that fingerspelled signs undergo pressure to conform to the rules of ASL structure. One of these rules seems to be “no more than two handshapes are allowed in a sign.” This may explain why some signs in fingerspelled signs are deleted, as in #back.