General Linguistics and Language Structure of ASL
This domain asks you to apply general linguistic concepts - design features of language, levels of structure, language versus dialect, modality - to ASL, and to place ASL historically and typologically. Questions often hinge on whether a claim about ASL is linguistically defensible or a common misconception.
What counts as a language
- Hockett's design features: arbitrariness, productivity, duality of patterning, displacement, cultural transmission. ASL shows all of them; iconicity is a matter of degree and does not make ASL "pictorial" rather than linguistic.
- Duality of patterning in a visual modality: Stokoe's cheremes (handshape, location, movement) combine into morphemes, which combine into sentences.
- Modality effects: simultaneity (non-manual layers, two hands), use of topographic space, and indexical pointing are consequences of the visual-gestural channel, not deficits.
ASL as a natural language with a history
ASL is not English on the hands, and it is not a universal sign language. It grew from Old French Sign Language, brought by Laurent Clerc to the American School for the Deaf (Hartford, 1817), plus local and home signs, and it has since diverged from LSF. Manual codes for English (Seeing Essential English, Signing Exact English, Signed English, Cued Speech) were deliberately engineered to represent English and are not natural languages. Fingerspelling and mouthing are contact phenomena and borrowings inside ASL, not evidence of English grammar.
Worked example
A candidate writes: "ASL follows English because Deaf people fingerspell names and use English word order in formal lectures." Reasoning toward a better answer: (1) fingerspelling is borrowed lexicon, and borrowing is normal in every language; (2) formal register may show English influence, but core grammar - topic-comment structure, verb agreement in space, aspectual movement - is not English; (3) mutual intelligibility is the practical test, and a monolingual English speaker cannot understand fluent ASL; (4) the manual codes were invented in the 1960s–70s, after ASL already existed. Conclusion: contact and register variation do not establish genetic or grammatical identity with English.
Traps that cost marks
- Treating iconicity as proof that ASL is "not arbitrary" and therefore not a full language.
- Calling Signed English a dialect of ASL.
- Assuming one international sign language, or that British Sign Language and ASL are mutually intelligible.
- Describing ASL as "grammarless," "gesture," or "pantomime."
- Confusing prescriptive notions of a "correct sign" with descriptive linguistics.