Google Search for ASL Phonetics lists several college course descriptions offering classes on the study of ASL phonetics. Linguists think of phonetics abstractly when referring to ASL, because signs can be broken into smaller units, just like words can be broken down into smaller sounds. It's used abstractly, not strictly per the definition in the dictionary, perhaps for lack of a better word. I'm just quoting what linguistics have said (I read that somewhere else about two years ago also)--and think they're just exerting their hearing bias on how sign language has phonetic properties, but whether it's true or not, it can be used to claim that ASL is an entirely different language of its own.
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Phonology and Signed languages
Many people are surprised to hear linguists talk about the "phonetics" and "phonology" of signed languages. Since these languages use a visual and not a spoken modality, there is the intuitively obvious fact that sign languages don't use sound to convey information and so we might be led to conclude that phonology and phonetics are irrelevant to signed languages. But, if we think about phonology and phonetics a bit more abstractly, this is not so obviously true anymore. We might think of phonology instead as an abstract component within our overall grammar that is responsible for organizing the system of production, i.e. of articulation, regardless of whether articulation is carried out with the hands or through speaking. In this sense, we can show clearly that signed languages have a phonology that is in many respects the same as spoken languages. A case in point is a consideration of how we can break signs down into smaller units, very much like we can break phonemes down into smaller articulatory features or properties.
Let's look at this idea a bit more in detail. As I mentioned in class, the linguist William Stokoe, who was a professor at Gallaudet University in Washington, was really the first person to systematically argue that signed languages had all the properties of spoken languages. One very important area of his research involved breaking signs down into smaller components, thus showing that signs were built up out of smaller parts, just like phonemes are made up out of smaller phonetic features, and just like morphemes in spoken languages are made up out of phonemes. This, of course, bears on the issue of human language grammars working by building elements by combining smaller discrete elements--a point which Pinker discusses at length throughout The Language Instinct.
In particular, Stokoe working to develop a phonetic transcription system for signs, originally identified THREE parameters or formational elements that signs are comprised of. If it helps, you can compare these to features like the voicing, place, and manner features that we have shown sounds to be comprised of. Here's a list of Stokoe's original three parameters:
# 1) the shape of the hand used in the sign (is it a fist, are the fingers extended, and so forth). This is simply called handshape today.
# 2) the place of articulation of the sign in space or on the signer's (speaker's) body (for example, on the chest, held in front of the chest, on the temple, etc...)
# 3) the particular movement that is associated with the sign (e.g. repeated circular motion, slow elliptical movement, back and forth movement, etc...)
Other researchers have identified other features that can be used to break down signs into additional components. These include taking into consideration the region of the hand that makes contact with the signer's body (if there is contact), the orientation of the hand with respect to the signer's body, and the orientation of the two hands with respect to one another. The big point? These parameters or formational elements allow us to see that signs, like phonemes in spoken language, aren't just unanalyzable wholes. Rather, they are built up out of features. In this sense, we begin to see that sign functions very much like spoken language in its phonology.
In fact, we can see that these parameters can function just like phonetic features in marking meaning between otherwise identical signs. That is, we can find minimal pairs of signs. I gave you three examples in class, taken from Language Files:
* 1) the difference between "apple" and "candy" is signaled by using two different handshapes at the same location and with the same movement
* 2) the difference between "apple" and "onion" is signaled by making the same handshape and movement, but by locating the sign at the mouth for "apple" and at the eye for "onion"
* 3) the difference between "think" and "wonder" is signaled by using the same place of articulation (the temple) and the same handshape (a pointed index finger), but the movement is different. Wonder involves a circle movement, while "think" does not involve moving the hand in a circle.
*end of excerpt*
Extracted from
what a linguistics professor said
