A red car (and not a car red)
At home (and not home at).
At home (and not home at).
Some languages are head-last in that they use postpositions and modify nouns with an adjective afterwards, etc.
So I asked her if American Sign Language is a head-first or head-last language.
English grammar in general goes Subject + Verb + Object. (shorted to SVO.)
I like candy. subject: I + verb: like + object: candy.
ASL grammar has a topic-comment syntax, which can sort of be analyzed as Object + Verb + Subject (OVS.)
CANDY, LIKE, ME. Topic (Candy: object), comment (verb: LIKE, me: subject). But does that make it a head-first or head-last language? It's hard to say.
In ASL, adjectives tend to come after languages, which makes one think it is a head-last language, but it isn't that clear-cut because adjectives follow nouns in Spanish too, which otherwise has very head-first syntax.
(Just for reference there are other languages that have SOV, for example Farsi.
من پلو دوست دارم man polo dust daram (subject: I object: rice verb: like)
I like rice. )
My linguistics professor didn't know the answer to my question but hopefully someone reading this (Shockwave) will know. Is ASL a head-first or head-last language, generally speaking?
3 comments:
An interesting question. Due to ASL's less linear structure it is harder to answer that one. I'll list a few points and you can go from there.
1. ASL's basic sentence structure is Time + Topic + Comment, but after that it gets less strict. Using your example of "candy" as the topic it could be phrased "CANDY LIKE pro.1" or "CANDY pro.1 LIKE" or even "CANDY pro.1 LIKE pro.1". The third example would be most common used. However, if the subject is the topic it would be "Pro.1 LIKE CANDY" or "Pro.1 LIKE CANDY Pro.1" with the first being more common.
2. Conveying location is done differently in ASL. The use of prepositions or postpositions is rare but they are occasionally used for stressing something. Typically the location of something is shown with classifiers, which convey a lot of information simultaneously.
3. Traditionally, adjectives and adverbs came after the word they are modifying but because of the influence of English they are now likely to be used before them.
My conclusion right now is that ASL is neither head-first nor head-last because it is not linear enough to be either. Given more information I may change my mind on that.
Hmmm Languages are awesome the way they work, when you learn a language you have to throw everything you know out the window, forget that in your language you might get surprised and go "Lets go Eat some Food!" or "Oh Wow!" to act surprise and in another language "Holy Cow my House is Falling!" is what you would say as an equivalent to "Oh Wow!" or "Run!Eat Food We!" to say Let's go eat some food! And then everything you know doesn't have a stable structure there, it's all so awesome in that way that you learn to see and think the way you do and see the world so very much differently.
Though ASL is based on English, it's still another Language. Therefore even though it comes out of English it's still totally seperate and at the same not so seperate and at the same time...I don't know where I was going at with that (lol nooo wheerreee) haha but at least I made a point about something else...totally off...topic (lol)
ASL isn't based on English. It's heavily influenced by English but it's really based on the LSF (Langue des Signes Française) that Laurent Clerc brought with him from Paris in 1817 when he came here to help Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet set up the first American school for the deaf. I recommend the book A Place of Their Own by John Vickrey Van Cleve and Barry A. Crouch for a more detailed history of ASL roots.
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