Pauses and syntax in American sign language |
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Authors: | François Grosjean Harlan Lane |
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Affiliation: | Northeastern University, USA |
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Abstract: | Research on spoken languages has shown that the durations of silent pauses in a sentence are strongly related to the syntactic structure of the sentence. A similar analysis of the pauses (holds) in a passage in American Sign Language reveals that sequences of signs are also interspersed with holds of different lengths: long holds appear to indicate the ends of sentences; shorter holds, the break between two conjoined sentences; and the shortest holds, breaks between internal constituents. Thus, pausal analysis is a guide to parsing sentences in ASL. |
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Keywords: | Reprints: Dr. F. Grosjean Department of Psychology Northeastern University Boston Mass. 02115. |
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