A Study On The Linguistic Functions Of Nonmanual Features In Shanghai Sign Language

Sign language is articulated by the hand(manual features including handshapes,directions,movements and locations),together with other parts of the body(non-manual features).Non-manuals refer to upper face including eye and eyebrow movement,lower face such as mouth gestures,head and body positions including head and body tilt,and so on.According to overseas studies,non-manuals are linguistically significant and can play different linguistic roles(phonological,morphological,syntactic and prosodic).The previous studies of sign language in China mainly focus on the manual features.The non-manuals as a linguistic part of Shanghai Sign Language has not yet been investigated in much detail.Moreover,the phonological behavior of those non-manuals in Shanghai Sign Language(SSL)has not yet been inspected till now.This dissertation explores the supra-segmental linguistic functions of non-manuals in SSL and analyzes the phonological behaviors of those non-manuals in the frame-work of Prosodic Model(Brentari 1998).Based on the first-hand data,this dissertation makes a systematic analysis of the non-manual features of SSL to answer the following research questions:1)What linguistic roles can the non-manuals as suprasegmental features in SSL play?2)How do the non-manual features mark different linguistic functions such as phonological,morphological,grammatical and prosodic and how do they interact with the manual features in the utterance?3)As prosodic markers,what is the relationship between the non-manual marking domain and syntactic structure?4)What is the phonological structure of these linguistic non-manual features and how are these non-manual features phonologically represented in the framework of Prosodic Model?5)What are universality and specialty of the non-manual linguistic functions and behaviors in SSL?To answer the research questions above,we have collected a lot of authentic data of SSL including 150 video clips,14 stories,12 conversations and 4 clips from the subjects' speeches,all of which take 1 hour 56 minutes and 3 seconds.The transcriptions of non-manuals are done by EUDICO Linguistic Annotator(ELAN).The cues of non-manuals are defined as presented the following table:ELAN transcriptions and annotations of the data are done with help of a deaf assistant for correct understanding of all the signs and their representations.Whether the non-manuals are linguistic or not is judged by the three criteria of Deuchar(1984)and other three criteria of Liddell(1980)and Baker-Shenk(1983).By means of qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze the annotated data,we have found that non-manuals in SSL are linguistic and can mark different linguistic structures:phonologically(functioning as phoneme to distinguish different signs);morphologically(as adverbal or adjective morphemes to modify verbs and nouns);grammatically(to mark different syntactic structures such as negatives,interrogatives and verb agreement);prosodically(to mark prosodic units such as prosodic words,phonological phrases and intonational phrases).Through the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data in detail,specifically,non-manuals mark different linguistic structures.The basic conclusion with respect to non-manuals in SSL is that the features of the lower face are mainly phonological and morphological markings,those of the upper face and head positions can mark different syntactic structures and prosodic units.For example: 1)Mouth gestures can occur as a compulsory part of lexical signs,as well as an independent meaningful unit that co-occurs with lexical verb or noun signs.2)Eyebrow raising and head forward can mark yes-no questions,eyebrow frowning & head forward function as wh-question markers.3)Eyegaze is used to mark the concord of spatial verbs and agreement verbs.4)Negatives are characterized by headshake and head tilt backward.5)Eyeblinks together with head movement can mark intonational phrases.Through a systematic examination of the phonological behavior of nonmanuals in SSL,it shows that 1)the phonemic nonmanuals are phonologically specified in the lexicon.2)the change of mouth gestures as adjectives in surface representation result from the spreading and/or delinking of nonmanual features in the phonological structure.3)the non-manuals as adverb or grammatical markers are post-lexical features and specified as post-syntactic process.4)some underlyingly specified nonmanuls such as headnod & headshake are syllabified and independently functioned as adverbs.Generally speaking,our results show that the non-manuals in SSL play the same linguistic roles as the foreign sign languages(the upper face and head movement mark grammatical and prosodic structure).But there are also differences that the facial expressions cannot mark negatives,head movement or blink cannot mark intonational phrases independently,but they can only mark it together with other cues in SSL.