Alternate Sign Language Essay

We see that alternate sign languages in Arandic languages play an important role in how people communicate in everyday life. However the question arises whether an alternate sign language is, in Kendon’s words (1988a, p.390), a “fully autonomous” unity or simply a twin version of a spoken language. Linguists argue that alternate sign language and spoken language are not two different languages, but rather the former is based on the syntactic, pragmatic, and semantic properties of the latter. Green and Wilkins (2014), for example, claim that Arandic alternate sign language maps to spoken language and its pragmatic and semantic rules. Furthermore, alternate sign languages, as Kendon (1988a) proposes, are “the gestural representations of the semantic

Studying the communities of the northern part of the Arandic region, Adam Kendon (1988a) noticed that there was a variation in the complexity of their sign languages. One of the registers was lacking the capacity to express all propositions, while another was a highly developed language or, in other words, a “fully autonomous mode of discourse” (Green and Wilkins 2014, p.236). These findings were corroborated by Green and Wilkins, who claimed that although Arandic people do not use sign language as their primary mode of communication in everyday life, deft signers are able to converse entirely in sign if their companion is also a proficient sign language speaker (ibid, p.235). Moreover, as it has been discussed in the previous section, an Arandic speaking person has two options to express the statement “there is no water”. The first option would be to say kwatye-ke arrangkwe (water-DAT nothing/no), while the second one would be to omit the negation word and substitute it with a “nothing/no/negation” sign. If we take a closer look at these phrases, we see that the word and a sign for negation are both positioned sentence finally. Although this is by itself is not enough to claim that alternate sign language and spoken language share the