| Sign language is a silent language.By the 1960's William Stokoe had already begun studying sign language.His initial research focused on American Sign Language.Stokoe believed the essential components of a sign were handshape,including information on palm orientation,hand movement and hand location.The structural level created by these three components is analogous to the phonetic level of spoken languages.In the 1970's sign language researchers made palm orientation independent of handshape,creating a four-component analysis consisting of handshape,movement,location and orientation.At the same time the importance of non-manuals was recognized.Shanghai Sign Language(SSL) is a dialectal variety of Chinese Sign Language.This thesis is based on the natural sign language of the Shanghai deaf.A corpus of video clips of 4,784 signed lexical items and 1 hr 14 min 42 sec of sign language video clips,including ten sign language stories and ten segments of speeches from five deaf signers,was extracted from several hours of sign language video recordings.Based on the aforementioned corpus,an attempt was made to reveal and describe the fundamental phonetic features of SSL.This includes an inventory of handshapes,their distinctive features,their frequency of usage in the corpus;categories of hand movement and their features,the number of hand locations and palm orientations and the function of non-manuals in SSL.Additionally,analysis of the findings showed sign variation and phonological processes in continuous speech.There is also a discussion of the phonemes and syllables of sign language.Statistical analysis reveals that SSL has 69 handshapes,of which handshapes No 10 and 21 each have one variation.Hand movements in SSL may be divided into 3 large classes.The first class contains general movements,which is the movement that hand(s) as a whole.There are 11 subclasses to this class of movements and 63 motions within these 11 subclasses.The second class is two-handed alternating movements.There are six subclasses of this class which contain 21 different motions.The third class consists of internal movements of which there are five subclasses containing 26 types of motion.Thus in total there are 22 subclasses of movement with 110 member motions.In addition to this,there are seven special types of movement used in the articulation of Chinese character signs.There are 28 hand locations in SSL.Of these 28 locations,those in neutral space play a special role and are the locations that occur with the highest frequency.The non-dominant hand serving as the point of articulation for the dominant hand is the actualization of neutral location.There are eight hand orientations in SSL.Non-manuals in SSL may be divided into normal non-manuals and mouthing.Some non-manuals are obligatory constituent to a sign,while others are not.Symbolized non-manuals are an organic component of a sign,while non-manuals that occur during speech serve emphatic and modificatory functions.Sign variation is often observed in long segments of continuous speech.Some of these variations are analogous to phonological processes in spoken language.The research shows that phonological processes in SSL mainly occurs in variation in handshape,location,orientation,dropping of two-handed signs and a combination of multiple alternations.Signs occurring in speech sometimes change due to the effects of grammar and in this mainly movement and handshape undergo change.Handshape,movement,location and orientation in SSL can be likened to phonemes of spoken language since they function as semantically distinguishing features.The research shows that sign is the smallest phonetic unit in SSL.In different sign,according to human's apperception,the visual sonority sequency of movement,handshape,location and orientation is variant.
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