now we're going to begin delving in the
Linguistics by looking at phonology
before we look at the phonology of
American Sign Language let me first give
you an understanding what Phonology is
just based on language in general and
specifically based on English then we'll
come to understand what it means in
American Sign Language and in other sign languages
first of all you should understand that
a phoneme is the smallest unit of language
a phoneme is the the smallest sound or
in sign language movement, handshape,
gesture that on its own doesn't mean
anything at all but it comes about in
predictable ways it's not random
there are specific times when you can
use certain sounds and certain sounds
can be used with other sounds certain
sounds influence other sounds so that
it's predictable but it's not meaningful
by itself it doesn't mean anything but
you can use it to build parts of speech
that are meaningful those parts of speech are
called morphemes we're going to look at
morphology
so let's take a word the word "smaller"
"smaller" now notice that it's spelled
with two L's but there's really only one
else sound there
so when we think about the morphemes of
smaller we can see that there are really
two parts that have meaning they're
"small" which is a word on its own
meaning little or of not much size and
then there's the "er" which means more
than so smaller means more small right
smaller than something else
so we notice that "small" that first
morphine that meaningful unit that means
something on its own is made up of these
little parts the "sss" the "mmm" the "aaa" and the "lll"
and that on their own don't mean
anything
the S sound doesn't mean anything the M
sound doesn't mean anything
they have to be used with the other
sounds to mean something in the same way
the same way the "er" sound the ER that sound
together the "e" - "r" together
does mean something
it's the it's the the phoneme "er" that means greater than or more than
but by itself the "e" and the "r"
don't have meaning those are phonemes
now the phonemes have to be organized in
predictable ways
for example we don't have any English
words that have the phoneme s m & p and r
one right after the other
we can't do that it's just a rule in
English that the sounds can't go
together that way we have to have vowels
in between all of those constant and
in the same way in ASL we're going to
find that there are certain parts of
signs, handshapes, movements, facial
expressions, palm orientations that don't
have any meaning on their own but that are used in predictable ways and we're
going to call these the phonetic parts
of the sign and then we're going to find that
those parts of the sign can be put
together in meaningful ways they're
called morphemes and then of course the
morphemes can be put together into
sentences which we'll look at in syntax
so for right now we need to understand
that phonemes are those smallest units
that don't mean anything on their own
but that can be used in predictable
patterns
you can't just put any phoneme anywhere
and that these predictable patterns are
used to build parts of speech that do
have meaning those parts of speech that
we're going to call morphemes
