Hello everyone,
My goal for March was to focus on the difference in sentence structures between English and ASL. As I have mentioned here before, ASL does not have a rigid sentence structure like English does. There is a lot of fluidity in how one sentence can be said as long as you get the message across. However, we were still able to identify and practice some more popular sentence structures in ASL. I am careful about calling them “popular sentence structures” and not “rules” because an ASL sentence that does not follow these popular patterns is still considered correct. One of the most interesting sentence structures that we discussed during our language sessions, was rhetorical questions. ASL rhetorical questions are not used in the same context as rhetorical questions in English. Unlike in English, ASL rhetorical questions are both asked and answered by the signer, not by the receiver. Examples of situations where ASL rhetorical questions are asked are as follows:
- English: I am flying to Seattle.
ASL: Me Go-to Seattle How? Fly.
- English: I was late because my car broke down.
ASL: Me arrive late why? My car break-down.
There are also a lot of non-manual signs like raised eyebrows, continuous eye contact, body shifts etc. associated with the bolded part of the sentence. I remember feeling very confused while learning this sentence structure because it felt so redundant and unnecessarily complicated. The question part is used to emphasize the answer rather than just signing a normal non-rhetorical question. However, I wonder if it is really necessary because if you are talking to someone or signing to someone, they probably already have your attention. In my opinion, this extra step breaks the flow in the conversation and does not nearly add much value. Moreover, my language partner says that Deaf people often “shorthand” things and rarely follow rules like these. So, this rule reminded me of the differences between formal and informal English. This seems to be a case of more formal ASL, which is not common in everyday conversations.
Another sentence structure that we learned was the topic comment structure. The topic comment structure is roughly the same as saying Object+ Subject+ Verb structure, where we describe the topic first and then make a comment about it. For example:
- English: I want that red dress.
ASL: Dress red there, me want.
The nonmanual signs associated with the topic-comment structure is the same as the rhetorical questions above. Unlike the rhetorical sentence structure, I found the topic-comment structure to be incredibly useful because describing the topic first allows the viewers to orient themselves to the topic. Speaking from my own experience with ASL, it takes a while to register things as a listener/viewer if the conversation is about something that is not present in the vicinity. So, describing the topic first is helpful in starting to think about the person, place, issues etc. being discussed and then hear the speaker’s perspective on it. The topic comment structure is also used in yes/no questions, information seeking questions, conditional sentences, negation etc. After going through all these ASL sentence structures, I can say the topic comment structure is arguably the most versatile and foundational sentence structure in ASL.
While learning the sentence structures was incredibly important in itself, there is something bigger that came out of this experience. While critiquing and evaluating the usefulness of every structure, I came to realize how my understanding of ASL had evolved in a single month! I now understood the intricacies of signing and had opinions about what is useful vs what is redundant. This was one of the biggest milestones in my ASL learning journey and made me so much more confident about learning. My goal for March was just to be able to identify differences in sentence structures between ASL and English and I think well exceeded those goals. With a firm understanding of the foundational sentence structures, I want to focus my attention back to expanding my ASL vocabulary for the next month.
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