#jane fernandes

Jane Fernandes, President Elect of Guilford College

An Introduction to American Sign Language Grammar, Part One By Jane K. Fernandes Syntax, or the way in which words are placed together to create a certain meaning, often proves one of the most difficult grammatical concepts to master. With English, speakers have relatively little flexibility in terms of syntax since word order indicates the different parts of speech. American Sign Language (ASL) presents signers with a much more fluid system. Due to this flexibility, those who learned ASL as a second language often make slight mistakes as they revert to the syntax of their native language. This phenomenon is equivalent to individuals having an accent when they speak languages other than their first. Having an accent when signing generally results only in small linguistic accidents, but may create complete misunderstandings in some cases. Basic sentences in ASL, as in English, utilize a subject-verb-object construction. ASL, however, topicalizes a sentence when introducing a new topic, meaning that the signer places the object first and pauses after the sign for emphasis. The object should represent the new topic. After the signer announces the topic change, he or she reverts to the normal word order. Those learning ASL must quickly master this technique, since it may drastically change the meaning of a sentence. For example, the topicalized ASL sentence “ME LOVE YOU” would be YOU, ME-LOVE, which goes against the English speaker’s intuition.  When indicating time, the ASL user must place the marker at the beginning of the sentence whenever he or she has not previously established it. The English user has more flexibility with establishing time, especially since the language conjugates for tense. In general, ASL prefers adjectives that follow the nouns they modify, unlike English. Adverbs, which usually have the same sign as the corresponding adjective, precede the verbs they modify. This rule, as previously discussed, does not hold for temporal adverbs, which must come first. ASL negates sentences in a variety of ways. Two signs, “not” and “none,” manually negate a sentence. “Not” negates a verb and “none” negates a noun. The signer may also shake his or her head during a clause to negate it. To indicate a yes or no question, a signer raises the eyebrows. Lowering the eyebrows signals an information question. Unlike in English, the question word comes at the end of the sentence. For both varieties of questions, the signer leans forward and holds the last sign slightly longer than normal. About the Author: Jane K. Fernandes serves as Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at The University of North Carolina at Asheville. An alumna of Trinity College, she received her Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature from The University of Iowa. Jane Fernandes has actively supported deaf education for decades and is fluent in French, Italian, and ASL.