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The location of the hands while fingerspelling can indicate the relationship between people or places. The location carries meaning and so is grammatical. For example, someone may be talking about a trip they took to a distant location. In the course of the conversation, they may have set up the location of that place in front of them to the right. When it comes time to talk about returning from that location, they may begin the fingerspelled sign #back in that location with the palm facing in, move the sign towards them, and complete it near their body. Similarly, a girlfriend and a boyfriend may have a history of breaking up and getting back together. Someone might describe this by fingerspelling #back simultaneously on the right hand and the left hand with the palms facing each other and the hands moving together, and by then signing #off with the hands moving away from each other. Another example is the fingerspelled sign #no. It can be signed away from the signer, meaning “I say no to you or to a third person.” However, it can also be signed with the palm facing the signer, with the meaning of “You (or someone) say no to me.” Here the location and the orientation provide grammatical information about who is the subject and who is the object of the verb. We will discuss this more in the section on verbs.

Lexicalized Fingerspelling

Many people have noticed that the separate signs of fingerspelling tend to blend together when they are produced in fingerspelled signs. That is, they tend to “become like individual signs.” In linguistics, the word lexicalized means “like a word,” or “word-like,” that is, like an independent unit. Examples of lexicalization in English include compounds such as greenhouse, breakfast, and Christmas, which are formed by uniting two separate lexical items that function as one word with a unique meaning. Acronyms such as NASA (National Air and Space Administration) and scuba (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus) are also examples of lexicalization in English. In these cases, a new word is formed by using the first letter of each word in the phrase.

Lexicalization describes the process of fingerspelling because the separate signs do seem to become like one, to be used like other ASL signs, and to follow the rules of ASL signs. For example, Battison noticed that in general, no sign uses more than two handshapes. This means that a fingerspelled sign like #if or #or can preserve both signs and still follow the rules of ASL. However, fingerspelled signs like #back or #early present problems because they are formed from four and five signs. The result is that while all of the signs are not immediately lost, there is a tendency to reduce the number of signs as they become more like other ASL signs.

There is a difference between full, formal fingerspelling and lexicalized fingerspelling, but it is easy to see how quickly the process of lexicalization begins. Just think about how you would fingerspell someone’s name if you were introducing them for the first time and then how the form of that fingerspelling would change if you used the name over and over again in a conversation. The changes that you observe are examples of lexicalization. The eight changes described earlier are also parts of the lexicalization process.

It is important to realize that lexicalization is a gradual process and that some fingerspelled signs may be more completely lexicalized than others. For example, #no and #do have undergone many changes and look like ASL signs, while signs like #busy and #early are not as fully lexicalized. Similarly, the sign #mich, which is a sign in terms of meaning and use (it is clearly used and understood as the name for the state of Michigan), is less lexicalized as it retains four handshapes in a sequence not found in natural ASL signs (see “The Snowmobile” on the DVD).