Browsing by Author "Van Niekerk, Andries"

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    A lexical comparison of South African sign language and potential lexifier languages
    (2020-03) Van Niekerk, Andries; Huddlestone, Kate; Baker, Anne; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of General Linguistics.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: South Africa’s history of segregation was a large contributing factor for lexical variation in South African Sign Language (SASL) to come about. Foreign sign languages certainly had a presence in the history of deaf education; however, the degree of influence foreign sign languages has on SASL today is what this study has aimed to determine. There have been very limited studies on the presence of loan signs in SASL and none have included extensive variation. This study investigates signs from 20 different schools for the deaf and compares them with signs from six other sign languages and the Paget Gorman Sign System (PGSS). A list of lemmas was created that included the commonly used list of lemmas from Woodward (2003). The signs were elicited from informants and documented based on their phonological properties: handshape, movement, location, and orientation. SASL lexical variety was documented. Sign types were identified by comparing the different signs for a lemma with each other; signs that differed in more than one phonological parameter were classified as different sign types. These sign types were then compared with counterparts in six potential lexifier sign languages, American Sign Language (ASL), British Sign Language (BSL), Irish Sign Language (ISL), German Sign Language (DGS), Flemish Sign Language (VGT), and Dutch Sign Language (NGT) and PGSS. Signs that are heavily influenced by iconic devices were removed from the final comparison. Loan signs were identified on the basis of phonological similarity. The results showed the highest percentage of borrowings from BSL at 15.9%, followed by ASL with 12.6% and VGT at 11.7%. The results indicated that 65.4% of the sign types were influenced to some degree by foreign sign languages or PGSS. There is a substratum of signs that did not match with any of the potential lexifier languages or PGSS and their origins are uncertain; they possibly emerged naturally or were borrowed from a language that was not included in this study.