Changer de regard et de discours sur la langue des signes française

The French National Law of 2005 on Equal rights and opportunities, participation and citizenship of disabled people, recognized French Sign language (FSL) as a language in its own rights. Through this formulation, the existence of a cultural and linguistic community constituted by signers has been officially recognized. This denomination of ‘language in its own rights’, is actually used with the common meaning of ‘full language’. However, at the same time, paradoxically, sign language teachers and learners speak about French sign language as a way of depicting or showing, in other words, as a way of expressing thoughts through pictures. Accordingly, FSL appears more as an iconic semiotic system than a ‘full’ language. Where does this paradox come from? To answer this question, one needs to go back to late seventies – early eighties, a period corresponding to deaf awakening in France and to the emergence of the linguistic description of signed expression proposed by Christian Cuxac and called ‘the semiological model’. Cuxac developed his model in order to describe the different ways a signer conveys sense in signed language. He highlighted the specificities of signer’s expressivity, foremost of which are iconic features he called Transfers. Indeed the most famous aspect of this model is more about how signers perform than how sign language itself is organized.The definition of features called ‘transfers’ (Cuxac 2000) is effectively unambiguous, and the explanations of the phenomenon makes it clear that it describes what signers do : during a personal transfer, signers use their body to represent the actions and postures of a protagonist in the discourse ; the signer becomes the entity or character discussed. With a situational transfer, signer aims to depict a situation with his/her dominant hand located or moving relative to the other hand. Cuxac always focuses on what a signer does or where and how his or her hands move. His model is very suitable to highlight the specificities of a signer’s expressivity. It is not appropriate to describe the language organisation.Because this theoretical model emphasizes the specific components of a signer’s behavior in expression, it consequently enhanced the institutional recognition of Deaf Community. At the time, Deaf people attempted to differentiate and build their own identity. This model satisfied something they were asking for : a recognition of their specificity through their language specificity.The language used by deaf people in France is called French Sign Language. The aim was to insist on the fact that it was constituted by series and combinations of signs rather than gestures. In common parlance, the French word signer (to sign) acquires a new meaning, and is employed with the sense of "to speak in signed language", or "to use hands for speaking". Therefore, the word "signs" is used to refer to what the signer is doing with his/her hands, the movements of her/his hands. Explaining how a signer signs consists of explaining how he performs. There is indeed a great deal of confusion between “signs”, as in “gestures made by signers when they sign”, “to sign”, as in “to speak in signed language”, and “signs” as in “words of signed languages”. Since FSL is recognized in educational and social contexts, training programs are expected. Moreover, a description of its grammatical organisation is needed to assess its acquisition by deaf children and to construct teaching curricula. The semiological model is widely disseminated in the training environment. In practice, the very pertinent terminology developed by Cuxac to identify expressive behavior of the signer in narratives has been gradually employed without an apparent difference of meaning to characterize a semantic category or a grammatical category of words. It happens consistently when SL teachers or learners speak about SL. However, SL linguists as well add to the confusion. In Sallandre (2003) for example, transfers are considered as units of discourse. She takes away the part of the definition given by Cuxac concerning the transfer as a conscious behavior of a signer intending to illustrate his point. This appears clearly in an overview proposed by Fusellier (2006). She presents transfers as a category of signs, at the same level as polycomponential signs (Slobin 2003) or classifier predicates (Supalla & Newport 1978). The word “transfer” is now considered as equivalent to “iconic verbal predicate”. Using a unique term “transfer” to identify a category of words and the behavior of a signer at specific moments maintains the confusion between “how one signs” and “of what consists the linguistic and grammatical combination of signs in SL” . Therefore, it is no longer possible to distinguish the linguistic construction from its pronunciation.Three examples in FSL show that it is more relevant to consider motion verbs in depictive structures as a peculiar verbal predicates category than a situational transfer. A depictive intention induces the choice of such a verbal polycomponential predicate regardless of the intention of the signer to reproduce the situation. Similarly, it is not relevant to present personal transfers as a verbal predicates category. Verbs of action, emotional or intellectual states, (and not only) imply a spatial construction, where the body of a signer determines the place of the grammatical subject. These verbal predicates have spatial agreement. It is not a choice of the signer, nor an option.We claim that it is absolutely necessary to separate and, at the same time, to preserve two different statements on a sign language. Each of them may imply its own terminology. One must be employed for the description of expressive features (the transfers) where what the signer does appears in iconic relation with what he or she refers to. However, for the description of syntactical structures and morphological components, the trans-linguistic terminology has to be employed. Thereby, the result is certainly not to deny or underestimate the specificity of signed languages. A signer’s way of speaking results from a combination of gestural and verbal components, perfectly original due to the visuo-gestual modality of signed languages. It is this modality that is responsible for the fact that signs (words in signed languages) and linguistic structures are always motivated. In order to explain how a signed language works, one must focus on the language itself and consider it as a language in addition to other languages in the world. Signed languages can be compared to other languages, whatever their specificity is. Over the last decades, the domain covered by linguists has changed, with cognitive linguistics, or enunciative linguistics, and so has research on language and gestuality. These developments force to reconsider the specificity of signed languages: transfers occur not only in signed languages. Speakers, as well, intend to become protagonists of the story using their voice, posture, and face. They aim to represent path with their hands and body, in addition or combined to the verbal structures. Mechanisms are very close, for signers and speakers in vocal languages, if the comparison is for the same kind of discourse and the same intention. The peculiarity of signed languages only comes from its unique way to combine gestuality and language. Researchers using the common linguistic terminology will be able to describe the syntactic and morphological structures of FSL and develop didactic material and training programs for teachers. They will consequently deliver a different representation of their sign language as a language