Inalienable Possession in British Sign Language
Jordan Fenlon and Kearsy Cormier, University College London (UCL)
Introduction
When expressing possession, some languages make a systematic distinction between nouns that are either inalienable or alienable. Inalienable nouns refer to permanent phenomena (those that can not be separated from the possessor). In contrast, alienable nouns refer to non-permanent entities.
Inalienable nouns marked morphologically: Yabem (Austronesian)
Alienable possession marked with pronoun:
i) ngoc andu ‘my house’, nem I ‘your fish’
Inalienable possession marked with suffix:
ii) gwade-c ‘my uncle’, oli-m ‘your body’
(Bisang, 2002)
Inalienable nouns marked morphosyntactically: French (Indo-European)
Alienable possession marked with possessive pronoun
iii) Il ouvrit ses lettres ‘he opened his letters’
Inalienable possession marked with definite article
iv) Il ouvrit les yeux ‘he opened his eyes’
(Cooper, 2002)
Castillo (1992) notes that inalienability is characterized by the following:
- Conceptual dependence of the possessum and the possessor
- Inseparability between the possessor and the possessum
- Permanency of the relation
- Inherency of the relation
In languages that encode inalienable possession, the inalienable/alienable distinction is consistently seen with body-part and kinship terms. Some studies (Cooper 2002) report other semantic categories such as personal possessions, clothing, physical and mental characteristics which are marked as inalienable although none as consistently as body-part and kinship terms.
Sutton-Spence & Woll (1999) report that British Sign Language (BSL) encodes inalienable possession using the personal pronoun INDEX and alienable possession using the possessive pronoun POSS (see below). These findings are based on a small informal study on possession in BSL (Woll, personal communication). The current study looks to investigate inalienable possession more formally and with more data.
Research Questions
- Is there evidence supporting a grammatical alienable/inalienable distinction in BSL?
If there is evidence for an alienable/inalienable distinction in BSL:
- What kinds of semantic categories are marked as inalienable in BSL?
- Are these categories the same as those found in spoken languages?
Method
Data were collected from the following sources:
Deaf Century video: A 3-part British television series which include interviews from older deaf BSL signers recounting previous experiences in school and Deaf culture. Information concerning the signers background were not made available.
Conversational data: Two signers (one native signer and one who learned to sign from the age of 5) discuss their attitudes towards work.
Doctor-Patient Task: Two native signers performed a role-playing task where one was a doctor and the other a patient. The ‘doctor’ had to diagnose the patient’s mystery illness by asking questions (designed to elicit use of possession with body-part nouns).
Family Tree Task: In an interview setting, two native signers asked each other questions about their families and drew a family tree based on responses. (Designed to elicit use of possession with kinship terms.)
Storyboard Task: Three native signers created a story outlining the relationship between a person (the possessor) and a set of pictures (designed to elicit use of possession with kinship terms, NAME and typically alienable objects.)
Results
Body-parts (N=4) and NAME (N=13) and kinship (N=7) marked with INDEX: BSL
Data from all tasks revealed INDEX consistently used with the sign NAME and with body parts. However, we identified few tokens of INDEX in our data for these categories. A small proportion of kinship terms were also marked with INDEX.
INDEX-1sg EAR INDEX-1sg MOTHER
DOCTOR TRY SHOUT++ INDEX-1sg EAR INDEX-1sg MOTHER HOME
‘The doctor tried shouting in my ear’ ‘My mother was at home’
Additionally, the possessive pronoun POSS was used much more than INDEX with kinship terms. This contradicts traditional (spoken language) patterns for inalienable possession.
POSS-1sg MOTHER POSS-2sg FAMILY
BETTER ASK POSS-1sg MOTHER WANT RESEARCH POSS-2sg FAMILY
‘You’ll be better off asking my mother’ ‘I want to ask about your family’
Discussion
Overall these data do not provide strong evidence for grammatical marking of alienable/inalienable possession in BSL.
- Kinship terms are marked with the possessive pronoun in most cases. The 14% where we see the use of INDEX all come from the same source, the Deaf Century video, which feature older signers with unknown backgrounds. All other data are known to be from native signers or early learners of BSL.
- The data do show consistent use of INDEX with body parts and with NAME. However, the number of tokens for each is small and it is not clear whether NAME is acting as a noun or verb (if verb, INDEX may not be acting as a possessive at all – e.g. INDEX-1sg NAME R.O.B ‘I am called Rob’).
Despite problems with claiming that BSL grammaticises inalienability, the possessive constructions in these data that do use INDEX are consistent with patterns across spoken languages, where body parts and kinship terms are crosslinguistically inalienable in languages that have the distinction, and the existence of any other semantic categories marked as inalienable in a given language implies that body parts and/or kinship terms will also be marked as inalienable (Kliffer 1996; Nichols 1988, 1992). Further research (and more data) is needed to determine more definitively whether BSL truly has a grammatical alienable/inalienable distinction.
Conclusion
Research in inalienability and similar features within signed languages highlights the importance of including signed languages in language typologies and studies of linguistic diversity. Language typologies that do not include signed languages may be making inaccurate generalisations about the world’s languages and about the possibilities of human languages in general.
Future Questions
- Is alienable/inalienable marking in BSL structurally similar or different to spoken languages?
- Do BSL signers accept the use of the possessive pronoun with body part nouns and NAME? If so, in what contexts?
- What kinds of patterns are found with plural pronouns in possessive contexts?
- Is the strong preference for use of the possessive pronoun with kinship terms due to BSL being in close proximity to English (a language that does not grammaticise inalienability)?
- Do other sign languages grammatically mark inalienable possession?
References
Bisang, W. (2002) Typology 10: Motivations III: Iconicity, 7th Summer School of the German Linguistic Society ( summer school 2002/Bisang.pdf)
Cooper, W. R. (2002) Inalienable Possession in Finnish and English: The Use of Possessive Pronouns/Suffixes with Nouns Designating Parts of the Body. Helskinki English Studies: The Electronic Journal of the Department of English at the University of Helskinki. ISDN 1457-9960, Volume 2, 2002
Kliffer, M.D. (1996) Commonalities of French and Mandarin Inalienable Possession In Jaszczolt, K and K.Turner (eds) (1996) Contrastive Semantic and Pragmatic 1. Oxford. Elsevier.
Nichols, J. (1992) Language Diversity in Space and Time. University of Chicago Press Ltd.
Nichols, J. (1988) On alienable and inalienable possession. In Honor of Mary Haas: From the Haas Festival Conference on Native American Linguistics. William Shipley, ed. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Sutton-Spence R, & B. Woll (1999) The Linguistics of British Sign Language. Cambridge University Press.
Velázquez-Castillo, M. (1996) The Grammar of Possession: Inalienability, Incorporation and Possessor Ascension in Guaraní Studies in Language Companion Series. John Benjamins.
Acknowledgements
The present study is based, in part, on an earlier BA dissertation project which was supervised by Rachel Sutton-Spence with additional input from Bencie Woll. We would like to thank Rachel for assistance in collecting, analysing and discussing data for the present study. We also thank Ulrike Zeshan for leading the crosslinguistic project on possessives which these data have contributed towards (for BSL) and the Centre for Deaf Studies (University of Bristol) for partial financial support.