Confederacy of a Dunce - Signing in the workplace

Monday, January 15, 2007

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My current post is at a newly-established research centre investigating various aspects of language and deafness. Non-signing staff are (very strongly) encouraged to learn BSL and use it regularly, not only to gain familiarity with the language they're researching, and to allow them to converse with participants in their sign language experiments, but also, especially, to provide a more inclusive atmosphere for deaf members of staff (it's great to have intepreters around, but impossible for interpreters to cover every conversation). Of course this includes everyday topics of idle conversation (Celebrity Big Brother, yesterday's darts championship and just why in hell I'd waste my time watching it, weekend/holiday activities, and so on) and ordinary day-to-day practical work-related stuff (what's wrong with the printer, when is everyone free for the next meeting, does anyone have a contact in research administration who can explain the new budget system, would people please remember to flush, and so on). But it also includes discussion of research topics, usually extremely specific and complicated (e.g. a recent discussion about the architecture of the language system, which led us to attempt to find a set of BSL signs that move vertically, but for which the vertical movement does or does not refer to actual vertical movement [contrast LIGHTNING {depicting motion of lightning striking downward} with HOUSE {moving downward to outline a typical house}]. And what kind of movement might be implied in those signs' English translations, and how close those translations might be, and the pluses and minuses of different ways we might conduct some experiments, and how the results might be interpreted, and so on).

I've been using BSL quite a lot lately (after a bit of a slump over the Christmas break, where I didn't see any signers for a couple of weeks), and feel like I'm able to get by fairly well on a lot of topics, at least when I'm conversing one-on-one with someone whose signing is familiar (I used to have a lot of trouble understanding left-handed BSL [mirror image of right-handed BSL], but that's not a problem any more as my most frequent conversational partner is left-handed). One-on-one conversations are still far easier as the signals of non-comprehension are easier to spot (and it's less intrusive to sign something like REPEAT/AGAIN [+facial expression something like "sorry, I'm totally lost"]); this is not specific to sign language, though. I'm also getting quite good at comprehending fingerspelling, although I still can't usually manage to work out full-speed native signing (it doesn't take many REPEAT/AGAIN signals before a signer will slow down on his/her own).

Most of my problems with BSL comprehension now seem to be related to individual signs, rather than just totally missing everything. For example, one morning last week a colleague signed something like this: I STAND BUS, DOOR OPEN. I SEE YOU, SAY-HI, YOU TURN-AROUND-GO-AWAY, MANY-PEOPLE BEHIND-YOU CROWD BUS (the gloss roughly indicates what he signed, and is almost certainly not correct. In English he might have said something like "I was standing on the bus, when the doors opened I saw you standing outside. But you stepped aside without noticing, and a bunch of other people got on". [I hate getting onto a crowded bus where I have to stand; I'd rather wait for the next bus where I might get a seat on the upper deck]). But I completely failed to comprehend the sign BUS, so I missed the entire context of the event in which I must have blanked him (to blank: look right at someone you know but not acknowledge their presence. Quite common in Dunce life as I often fail to recognize people I've met before. In contrast to Mrs. Dunce who has a steel-trap mind when it comes to faces). Or sometimes my comprehension errors are based on simple misinterpretation of a sign: like when my colleague signed G-G WORK AT-HOME? (Meaning "Is G. working at home today?" The sign glossed as "G-G" is two instances of the fingerspelled letter "G", a common way to refer to a person who does not have a name-sign. In this case, the first initial of my boss). I misunderstood "G-G" as the sign UMBRELLA (the two signs have quite similar handshapes and locations, and the motion of the hands is fairly similar). After all, it was raining, and I was rather wet. So I thought he was asking whether I came to work but left my umbrella at home. Plus, I usually use a different sign to refer to her ("G-V"), often accompanied by a pointing pronoun (I produce "G-V" then point toward her office). It was especially frustrating because he was also mouthing "umbrella" while producing the sign (English mouth patterns are often produced along with certain signs). But I'm really terrible at speechreading (and the mouth patterns were very similar in any case), so this didn't help me one iota.

In producing signs, I've also made quite a bit of a change over the past few months. Before, if I wasn't sure of a sign, I'd replace it with the fingerspelled English word. Sometimes this would lead a signer to prompt me with the correct BSL sign, but often they'd just let it slide in the interest of communication (they understood me, so why interrupt to correct me). But as my vocabulary has grown, I've become more confident in guessing at the correct sign, even if I'm not sure. And I (mostly) tend to get at least something right (maybe the right handshape, doing the right sort of motion, but in the wrong place). And it seems like these kinds of errors are more often corrected immediately (or else not comprehended, in which case I have to spell an English word, and more often than not a signer will show me the correct sign). I've also started focusing more on trying to produce grammatically correct BSL, and here's where I still have a lot of trouble. Especially because so often an ungrammatical sentence can be understood just fine--especially by signers who are expecting a particular kind of ungrammaticality based on English. We do have a weekly BSL class (for staff and students at the research centre) but only certain aspects of BSL grammar (e.g. pointing pronouns, reference to space and locations, word order for questions, some classifier constructions), have been addressed in detail (for example, it's been drilled into us that questions like "Where do you work?" should be signed with the "question word" last: YOU WORK WHERE [facial expression indicating that this is a question, rather than YOU WORK SOMEWHERE]). I'm quite certain that I make numerous grammatical errors in BSL; I just don't know what most of them are yet. Except for one type, related to the insidious effects of English....

As I mentioned before, many BSL signs are accompanied by mouth-patterns based on the English words. Often this is to disambiguate between homonymous signs (ALLIGATOR and CROCODILE are signed the same, but with different mouth patterns). This is not always the case, though; there are many cases where English mouth-patterns are not correct. For example, there are some signs which have obligatory mouth patterns that are not related to English words. For example, NEAR (index fingers extended, in contact with each other with palms back, located in front of the chest; right index finger makes a very short "hop"-type motion forward [see what I mean about the difficulty of describing a sign using words?!]) is accompanied by pursed lips, while FAR (same starting position; right index finger makes a long forward arc) is accompanied by puffed cheeks and exhaled breath. Mouthing English "near" or "far" in these cases is just plain wrong, but it seems very hard to resist. It's even harder for pointing pronouns ("I", "you", "they") and so on which don't have any associated mouth movements. I just about always find myself mouthing the English pronouns in these cases. And all sorts of other parts of English sentences which are not needed in BSL: I might sign I ASK G-G IF TOMORROW EVENING SHE GO PUB (possibly grammatically incorrect) but simultaneously mouth, in English "I'll ask G if tomorrow evening she's gonna go to the pub." Or even worse, describing objects or actions in detail. Like for example (from our BSL class), describing what an office window looks like. You'd start with a generic sign WINDOW, then sign forms depicting the arrangement and shape of panes, the window frame, etc (the order probably depends on certain things I'm not yet aware of). But while producing these kinds of descriptions, my mouth is running a mile a minute: "Window, it's got 4 panes, top panes round top, flat around. bottom panes square, frame all around. Opens up [as in, lower panes slide up to open it]. Outside little balcony, square, this wide." All of my English mouth patterns are synchronized with a particular sign (e.g. the "4 panes" occurs along with a handshape moving to depict a 2x2 layout of panes). I know this running commentary in English isn't correct, but it's really hard to resist.

language

Monday, January 15, 2007 2:13:49 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)