2

l.iO Sfw.iv lyfuw and wvb tyfwa iii HSl,

Whilc topographic space reflecls the layout of things in the real world, syntactic space is created from within the language and may not map onto thc real world. As an example, we may consider how we might express that some deaf Asians in Britain find themselves torn between two strong cultures: the British Deaf community and the British Asian community. Perhaps a signer wants to sign that it is difficult being Asian and deaf in Britain because she does not fit into either group. The signer might place a sign referring to ASIAN on the left side of her signing space and a sign referring to DEAF on the right. There are actually ho Asian people on her left, and no deaf people on the right. The placing of the two groups is just created from within the language to allow the signer to refer to them in space. It would be eąually possi-ble to place two totally abstract concepts in signing space, so that a sign representing HONESTY could be placed in one area, and a sign for WEALTH in another, to allow the signer to discuss the relative merits of the two.

Syntactic space uses grammatical structures which move in space between grammatically defined points. For example, in ‘I gave my aunt a book’ (AUNT Index₃ Index₁ BOOKj GIVE-BOOK₃) the real aunt in the real world does not have to be where the signer placed her for this sentence.The signer could even have posted it to her from London to Tokyo, but the grammatical location of the aunt is the same and that is where the book is directed.

We can compare topographic and syntactic space. In topographic space, the referent is at the location (e.g. where we place the sign for the church rela-tive to where we place the sign for the post office represents their real location in the world), whereas in syntactic space the referent is the location - and the location is the referent - (so the arbitrary location we give to British Asians and British deaf people is used to mean them).

This idea of dividing space like this is not accepted by all linguists. Some people (e.g.Trevor Johnston in Australia and Scott Liddell in America) have argued that there is no difference between these two. Certainly there are some examples where there seems to be overlap, and the debate is not yet resolved. Despite this, tire distinction is helpful for someone learning about BSL, and there is strong experimental evidence that there is a real difference between the two uses of linguistic space.

Evidence from brain-damaged deaf people

The brain is divided into left and right hemispheres: the left is known to be morę important for language and the right is morę important for spatial skills. Even though sign languages are visual languages, they are still primarily located in the left hemisphere. Much of the research into the relationship between the brain and signing has been done by Howard Poizner and Ursula Bellugi in America.

Damage to the left hemisphere of any person - whether they are a signer or speaker - can create very serious language problems but still leave them with spatial skills (e.g. tliey can match shapes, or look at two different layouts of an area they know and indicate which is correct). Some deaf people with left hemisphere damage can manage a few simple signs and can place some of those correctly. They may also be able to indicate if someone is describing a layout wrongly.

Damage to the right hemisphere can have relatively little effect on a person’s signing, in relation to both lexicon and grammar, except for the effects on use of topographic space. A right-hemisphere-damaged signer asked to describe a zoo might describe it with elear signs, but each sign would be placed in the same location, creating a visual image of animals being stacked higgledy-piggledy in one part of the ‘zoo’.

This distinction provides evidence that syntactic and topographic space in sign languages are treated differently in the brain, so we may expect them to function differently in signing.

Evidence from healthy signers

Evidence for two different uses of space in sign languages also comes from experiments conducted with healthy deaf people. An American researcher, Karen Emmorey, together with colleagues did work with two types of sce-narios; one involving topographic space, and one using syntactic space (fig. 8.1). She provided signers with two different types of sentences signed in ASL, and asked people to make a decision about a probe sign that did or did not occur in the sentence. The idea behind this experiment is that when people are in some way uncomfortable with what they have just seen, their decision-making processes will be slowed down. Thus, if subjects showed significant differences in speed of reaction to different types of probes in different sentences, this could be taken as evidence that they were thinking in different ways.

In an example of a sentence using topographic space, she described her dressing-table as a terrible mess. ‘My blusher case (right) is broken. My nail polish (centre) is spilled. My perfume (left) is empty.’ This description uses topographic space because it reereates a map of the dressing table and every-thing is laid out as it is in the real world.

In an example of a sentence using syntactic space, she described the problems of her parents⁵ house. ‘It is so expensive to run. It uses a lot of gas (right) , electricity (centre) and water (left).’The space used here is syntactic because the three Utilities are not located anywhere specifically in the real world, in her