Some remarks on the use of the notions 'subject', 'object' and 'topic' in Sign Language Research

In the first linguistic analysis of American Sign Language (ASL) ever published, Stokoe (1960) used the word 'chereem' to refer to what is known as a 'phoneme' in the literature on spoken languages. Brennan (1990, p.12) notices in this respect: "It is not surprising that there has been some questioning of the use of terms such as 'phonology', 'phonological', 'phonemic' and 'phonetic' when referring to aspects of sign language structure. There is something rather odd about using English terminology deriving from the Greek word for 'voice' or 'sound' when sign languages explicitly have gestural rather than vocal realisation." The fact that the use of terms as 'sentence' and 'clause' also have been questioned in relation to sign languages seems to indicate that there is a more general problem. To me the question whether it is possible to use the linguistic terminology which is applied to spoken languages in relation to sign languages seems to be one of the most fundamental issues in sign linguistics. Ever since the beginning of sign language studies there has been a discussion on how to describe word order in sign languages. Fischer (1975) and Liddell (1980) describe ASL as having an underlying SVO structure at the clause level while other authors claim that this language has a topic-comment structure (Cfr. Baker & Cokely, 1980). Upon examining the literature, it soon became clear to me that very often the notions used to discuss sign order remained somewhat 'murky'. It is not always clear to the reader what is meant by the author when using the terms 'subject', 'object' and 'topic' but it is very clear that not all sign linguists use these notions in the same way. This lack of uniformity and transparency is certainly not unique for sign language research but it does form a major problem when one wants to start studying sign order in a sign language that has scarcely been the subject of any research, such as Flemish Sign Language. In this paper I will discuss the various steps I undertook in the search for a way to apply the labels 'subject', 'object' and 'topic' to Flemish Sign Language; how these notions can be defined for sign languages and what problems remain to be solved.status: publishe