Talk:American Sign Language grammar

message: Is it worth adding a section on lexical semantics?  I added an entry on the clusivity page describing inclusive and exclusive "we" in ASL.  Should there be some reference here as well?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Teresacurl (talk • contribs) 02:50, 19 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I cut way back on the ASL section at clusivity. If the source didn't realize ASL doesn't have a grammatical distinction between 2nd & 3rd person, I'm a bit leery on accepting their claim that it has grammatical clusivity. (Part of the claim was clearly wrong, part might be correct.) kwami (talk) 11:12, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Cut back?? Looks like you added more than you cut, and it doesn't appear that you sourced much of what you added. Please explain in more detail. Thank you. Ward3001 (talk) 19:02, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lexical Semantics? 

message: why the frick is every sentence here OSV? That's not even the default word order of ASL!
71.58.168.204 07:54, 1 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It's not OSV; it's topic-comment, and the object is often the topic of the sentence. LordRM 20:28, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: word order

message: This is the least encyclopedic article I've read on Wikipedia.  I don't know anything about the subject matter, so I don't think I'm qualified to fix it, and I don't really know how to tag it to point out this fact, but something needs to be done.  It's informative, yes, but not nearly up to encyclopedic standards.  --ZxqamF 03:19, 24 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Almost completely replaced with the material from the main article, though a few statements and some of the examples have been retained. (You can tell the old material because I didn't regularize the formating.) kwami (talk) 22:58, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

text: Sections about Reduplication, Compounds, Affixes and other grammatical guidelines have not been properly cited. It would be in the best interest link sources to any linguistic evidence. Etoppo (talk) 04:51, 5 February 2018 (UTC)

text: The use of Bahan's book greatly outweighs the use of other sources, consider compiling these rules from more diverse sourcesEtoppo (talk) 04:51, 5 February 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Encyclopedic? 

message: ASL is strongly AVO, not OAV as the article now has it. Unfortunately, I won't have a chance to fix this up until next year. Could someone else do it? kwami 16:53, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Okay, got it, along with a fairly extensive rewrite. However, many of the links are bad, or don't direct to the proper articles, and I don't have a good enough connection to sort it out. Sorry to leave someone else with the mess! kwami 13:58, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

text: 'Topicalizing'? JoeSmack Talk 16:27, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: 'Topic/Comment' is how the standard word order is normally referred to.  But the topic is not always the object, it can be the subject too.  Cwterp 18:30, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  word order 

message: Can someone who knows ASL comment on the structure of sentences like ITALIAN ME ("I am Italian") — which was mentioned in one example in the article but not singled out in any way for discussion?  Specifically, I'm wondering about the sign order here.  Do "(noun/pronoun) — (am/are/is) — (adjective)" sentences in general show this same structure, with the adjective first and the subject last?  I wonder if it might suggest that the subject is actually taking on a verb-like character here (i.e., that the ME sign in ITALIAN ME might really mean something more like "I am") — something which, if true, could make this structure consistent with the generally verb-final character of ASL sentences.  Has anything been written about this that might be citable in the article as a source?  Richwales (talk) 04:27, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: It has to do with information flow, what is topical vs. new, etc. Too much to go into here, and the necessary studies might not have even been done. kwami (talk) 00:13, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  ASL grammatical structure? 

message: From the artcile:
"One of these, transcribed as '-er', is made by placing two B or 5 hands in front of the torso, palms facing each other, and lowering them. This suffix cannot occur on its own, but must follow one of a limited set of verbs, which then together with it become the sign for the performer of the action, as in 'drive-er' and 'teach-er'."
But I learned that that sign, on its own, simply means "person". Which is correct? 99.245.92.47 (talk) 01:29, 17 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: You are correct. kwami (talk) 01:42, 17 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  "-er" suffix? 

message: From the article:
"NOT negates a verb:
English: I don't like to play tennis.
ASL: TENNIS I LIKE PLAY NOT"
Is that really how it would work? It seems very counterintuitive, like saying "I like to not play tennis" rather than "I don't like to play tennis" in English. I would want to negate "like", not "play". Does negation of "like" only apply to nouns, or something? 99.245.92.47 (talk) 05:13, 17 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually, the negative is often an inflection of the word or phrase that is being negated. That should be in the article. kwami (talk) 08:40, 17 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Negation 

message: I'd like to add SignWriting to every example in this article. Any objections? I'll start doing it in a few days if not. Psiĥedelisto (talk) 09:31, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[SignWriting]] 

message: The (currently) third paragraph of the questions section refers to "leftward" and "rightward" movement for wh- signs, which generally have some motion within them but don't really travel. Can someone who understands what this was intended to mean please clarify it? At least indicate if right and left are referring to the speaker's or the listener's right and left. All the citations I visited for the section were behind paywalls, and the excerpts publicly available did not clarify the intended meaning.
174.16.253.174 (talk) 05:16, 8 February 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  WH- Questions 

message: Here are the first two sentences in the article.  
"ASL morphology is to a large extent iconic. This shows up especially well in reduplication and indexicality."
This seems like a bad way to start out.  
First, iconicity is often said to account for, perhaps, two thirds of lexical signs in ASL.  Of those, perhaps one half are "transparently iconic" meaning that relationship between reference and meaning would be relatively clear to someone unfamiliar with the language.  However, when Klima and Bellugi studied transparency (chapter 1 in Signs of Langauge  Klima, E. S., & Bellugi, U. (1979). The signs of language.), they found that very few signs could have their meaning guessed by non-signers.  That doesn't sound like "to a large extent iconic".  Then again, this is lexcial and not, strictly speaking, the grammar.  
Again, looking to Klima and Belugi  Klima, E. S., & Bellugi, U. (1979). The signs of language. on iconicity, they talk about how grammatical processes can suppress iconicity and they use reduplication as an example.  The noun YEAR is but most counts iconic (interpreted as the earth circling the sun) but when reduplicated to augment the meaning to EVERY YEAR, the movement changes from circular to linear and the dominant hand moves back and forth from the back of the non-dominant hand (never interpreted as the earth bouncing off the sun :)).  The grammatical form of the reduplication causes the iconicity to,as they say, "submerge".  
Second, I don't know that indexicality is, in and of itself, iconic in the proper sense.  That said, any sort of anaphoric reference using the space system or indicating verbs more generally do seem iconic but only tangentially so since the referent was established within the discourse based on grammatical features that are sometimes but not always iconic.  
I'm not trying to say that ASL is never iconic (in fact, I noted that signs often are), I just wonder if the first two lines of the article on ASL grammar should focus on iconicity, especially since the grammar can be involved in suppression of that same iconicity.  
That said, if the article were to spend more time on how classifiers and the space system (etc.) are involved in the grammar and both trend iconic (but non-analog), this focus on iconicity and grammar RichardBeckwith (talk) 23:02, 29 June 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  The existing text claiming that ASL is largely iconic seems problematic 

message: Hi everyone! My name is Grace, and I will be editing and creating content to add to the Grammar of ASL page.  This is for a final syntax project, and I am really looking forward to diving in to this extremely interesting topic. Over the next month, I will be editing the formatting of this page, as well as adding my own content. Gracehobby (talk) 21:05, 27 March 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: UBC linguistics 300 level syntax final project 

message: — Assignment last updated by Fedfed2 (talk) 00:53, 9 December 2023 (UTC)
thread_title: Wiki Education assignment: Linguistics in the Digital Age

message: Hello! I'm Lorelai, and I just wanted to let you all know I will be editing and improving this page for a school assignment. Please let me know if you have any opinions on this article or want anything specific done! Lorelaib (talk) 20:08, 16 October 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  LING Wiki Education Assignment