An Overview of Russian Sign Language

An Overview of Russian Sign Language Lenore Grenoble

Sign Language Studies, Volume 77, Winter 1992, pp. 321-338 (Article)

Published by Gallaudet University Press DOI: 10.1353/sls.1992.0027

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AN OVERVIEW OF RUSSIAN SIGN LANGUAGE Lenore Grenoble Abstract An overview of current knowledge about Russian Sign Language (RSL) and its use in Russia today notes that linguistic study of RSL is still in its beginning stages, defines issues that need to be studied, and suggests directions for further research. Most researchers of the deaf in the former USSR focused on pedagogy and psychology. An exception is Galina Zaitseva of the Moscow Institute of Defectology, who stands out as a true pioneer in RSL research. Her work, which will be described, supplemented by the author's observations and fieldwork. Sign language inthe USSR Russian Sign Language or RSL is the language of the Russian deaf, but there a second system was lately in use in member states of the former USSR: Signed Russian (for which Zaitseva has coined the Russian term kal'kirujus/c'aja rec/ 'calqued speech'). Analogous to Signed English, Signed Russian translates spoken Russian into signs, following the word order of spoken (literary) Russian. This is the language used in official interpreting, on the evening news television broadcast Vremja and in schools. Exactly how closely Signed Russian duplicates spoken Russian is very much dependent on the individual interpreter. Standard literary Russian is a highly inflected language with three grammatical genders and six nominal cases. Cases are not, as a rule, marked in Signed Russian, although some people do sign case endings when fingerspelling. Due to its high degree of inflection, spoken Russian word order is relatively "free," determined more by topic-comment constraints than by the necessity of marking syntactic relations. In general, Signed Russian interpretations follow the word order of the spoken Russian, but, without case markings, the interpretations can be very difficult to comprehend. It seems that in these instances the deaf clients rely heavily on lip-reading. In fact, interpreters simultaneously mouth the words they are signing when using Signed Russian, but not when using RSL (Zaitseva 1978).

@1992 Linstok Press, Inc.

ISSN 0302-1475

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No canonical form of Signed Russian has yet been identified. It seems best to envision the situation as a continuum with RSL at one end, and an extreme form of Signed Russian which exactly duplicates literary Russian at another. I suspect that no such "extreme" form of Signed Russian is in use, as I have never encountered it, nor have any of my informants. Such an "extreme" form would duplicate Russian word order in signs, and would presumably fingerspell all inflections. As it is, only fingerspelled words (such as proper nouns) duplicate Russian inflection, and then only sometimes. Exactly how much fingerspelling occurs depends both upon the signer's level of education and upon register. Zaitseva and Slezina (1971) point out that theoretically certain Russian morphemes (e.g. prefixes and grammatical inflections),as well as words for which there are no corresponding signs, may be fingerspelled. The latter include not only proper names and technical terms, but also prepositions and certain conjunctions. The exact level of comprehension of any utterance in Signed Russian will depend on several factors: (a) where the Signed Russian lies on the diglossic continuum; (b) the addressee's own knowledge of literary Russian; and, of course (c) any extra-linguistic context that might aid in interpretation. On the lexical level, there are some clear-cut differences between RSL and Signed Russian. For example, the 1st person singular pronoun in Russian is ja, which also happens to be a letter in the Cyrillic alphabet. RSL signs 1st person singular simply by pointing to the chest with the extended index finger (D-hand), whereas Signed Russian points to the chest with the JA-hand (see Appendix 1 for the manual Russian alphabet). Interpreters are taught the Signed Russian version. Another example, again from some very basic vocabulary, are the signs XOROSO 'good', 'well' and PLOXO 'bad', 'badly'. Interpreters are taught to sign 'good' with the O-hand (fingers extended with tips at the mouth) slowly moving downward and opening to a 5-hand. They are taught to sign 'bad' with the Ghand pointing downward, but the deaf community uses a "thumbs up" sign [0 A] for 'good' and a "pinkie up" sign [0 1] for its antonym 'bad'. One sign not used at all in Signed Russian,

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PARSHIVO 'lousy', is found quite frequently in colloquial signing. An example in context will illustrate its use: (1) JA KTEBE

XODIT', XODIT, XODIT'. ZASTAT' NE. MY DOGOVOR PARSHIVO

Ito your place go

go

go notfind. We agreement badly

'I went and went and went to your house, but didn't find you. We really botched the arrangements' Signed Russian also makes use of lexemes that combine fingerspelling and a sign (Zaitseva 1988:76f). For example, the spoken Russian word kabinet 'office' is signed by fingerspelling KA-B and then using the sign KOMNATA 'room'. Despite these differences, the lexicon of Signed Russian is by and large borrowed from RSL. However, Zaitseva (1981:34) notes that in Signed Russian, entire classes of signs that denote social-political concepts, scientific terminology, professional terminology and others are more widely represented than in RSL, where they are absent. (Such signs are coined by the educators of the deaf and interpreters, alongside the deaf themselves.) This lexical distribution is not surprising, given what we know about the distribution of High and Low forms in a Fergusonian notion of diglossia. According to Ferguson's classic definition of diglossia, the more formal the speech situation, the more likely speakers are to adopt the High style. Formal situations would typically be church sermons, political speeches, university lectures, etc.; whereas less formal situations would be conversations among friends and family and instructions to service people. In Russia today, Signed Russian is clearly the High style, which speakers aim for, believing it to be more prestigious than RSL. I had great difficulties eliciting RSL, since the mere fact that I was an American linguist made my encounters with deaf informants relatively formal. It should be noted that almost all instruction for the deaf in the Russian republic is conducted in standard literary Russian. Interestingly, both the deaf and the hard-of-hearing whom I interviewed considered spoken Russian to be their first language. They themselves distinguish between gramotnye and negramotnye ('literate' and 'illiterate') deaf, and consider the distinguishing factor to be language. "Gramotnye" deaf are fluent in literary and Russian Sign; it is the "negramot-

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nye" who use RSL. Even the terms Signed Russian and RSL are foreign to most deaf. The majority of the deaf are versed in both forms of sign, although their level of competence in the two may differ. Whether they use RSL or Signed Russian, or some combinations of these different linguistic systems depends upon the concrete circumstances of the communication. However, it should be added that there is a growing awareness of and respect for RSL among younger generations of Russian deaf people. Just how many different sign languages are currently in use in the former Soviet Union is an open question. Gejl'man (1981) shows the manual alphabets for a number of languages of the USSR; most of these are adaptations of the Russian Cyrillic manual alphabet. The languages of the Baltic Republics-Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian-are all written in the Latin alphabet. Fingerspelling in these republics is similarly based on a Latinbased manual alphabet. Zaitseva (personal communication) reports that RSL is used throughout the country (Russia or former USSR?). One might expect that the use of Signed Russian on the evening news broadcast would add to its dissemination, or at least to the dissemination of its lexicon. Nonetheless, I suspect that further research would uncover additional sign systems. Over 100 languages are spoken in the territory of the former USSR, and there are at least as many different ethnic groups as there are spoken languages. It is difficult to imagine that all these different peoples, spread over such a large geographic area, would use one and the same sign language.

Dialects Another area that has yet to studied is dialect difference. Informants report that there are dialect differences between St. Petersburg SL and Moscow SL, for example. The differences that they report are both phonological (i.e differences in the way a sign is performed) as well as lexical. I have no reports of syntactic differences. My informants are all native Muscovites. I was able to check their signs against Gejl'man 1975, the four volume RSL dictionary. Gejl'man himself is based just to the north of St. Petersburg in the adjacent town of Petrodvorets (at the Deaf Institute of the

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All Russian Federation of the Deaf). A cursory check of 320 signs shows that 160, or half, differed from Muscovite signs.1 However, it is difficult to tell how many of these discrepancies represent dialect differences and how many differences in signer idiolects. Some are probably due to regular diachronic change. In addition, a number of informants report that some of the signs in the Gejl'man dictionary were artificially created and are not regularly used among the deaf.

Lexicon Like ASL, RSL has a number of initialized signs. The latter use the handshape corresponding to the first letter of the Russian word; e.g. OPYT 'experience' seee. Informants told me of common "mistakes" made by confusing the phonetics or orthography of the spoken Russian words; these seem to be some sort of hypercorrections. Examples will make this point clearer. The sign for KON'JAK 'cognac' is often signed as KON' 'steed', where presumably the first syllable of the Russian kon'jak is confused with the word kon'. Another example is signing STUDEN', a kind of pudding-like dish instead of the intended STUDIJA 'studio'. A slightly different example of interference between spoken Russian and RSL is the sign STOJAT' 'stand'. This sign is used as a classifier much as in ASL, mostly for two-legged people. In spoken Russian the expression chasi stojat, literally 'the watch is standing', is used to mean 'the watch has stopped'. Interestingly, some deaf will sign 'my watch has stopped' using the sign STOJAT' '[person] stand' again, it seems, on the basis of the Russian. It is, of course, difficult to determine whether such cases should be treated as parallel but independent developments in the two languages, or if they are in fact a result of Russian influence on RSL. I think that the latter is most likely, given the long-standing tradition of oral-based education for the deaf in the USSR. Certain signs are avoided by the deaf because of potential confusion with gestures used by the hearing community. An illustrative example is the sign GLUXOJ 'deaf', made with the 5-hand. 1.This statistic includes all kinds of differences: i.e. in handshape, motion, or orientations, or where the Gejl'man dictionary cites an entirely different sign.

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The fingers initially point upward and then move downward with the thumb resting at the temple. This sign may have originally developed from an attempt to indicate the idea of a closed ear. However, it is identical to a gesture used by the hearing community nenormal'nyj, s privetom 'kooky', 'nuts', and so has come to be avoided by many.

Nominal categories RSL does not mark grammatical gender but does mark natural gender. Masculine is marked on the upper part of the face and feminine on the lower part of the face. What this means is that certain signs which make reference to males (such as OTEC 'father') are formed above the ear line, generally in the forehead region. Those that make reference to females are signed below the ear line, on the cheeks or chin area. For other signs with genetically male referents (e.g. PLEMJANNIK 'nephew'), the signer begins by indicating the forehead, and then forms the rest of the sign in "neutral" signing space, i.e. in the chest region. Likewise the morphological marker for females referents (as in PLEMJANNICA 'niece') is in the chin region. Grammatical plural is marked either by reduplicating the sign, or by signing MNOGO 'many' after the base sign. There do not seem to be any lexical restrictions on the use of MNOGO. The sign RAZNYJ 'various', which also follows the base sign, can similarly be used to indicate plural. Of course, numerical quantifiers can also be used to specify number. A dual can be formed by simultaneously signing the same predicate with both hands (as in 'the [two] planes landed'). Certain patterns of sign order have emerged: the negative marker follows the negated sign, tense markers or temporal adverbials follow the base sign, as does the imperative marker. The plural markers MNOGO and RAZNYJ follow the base, as do numerical quantifiers. Adjectival signs follow the modified sign, and question words tend to come at the end of the sentence. But these are only tendencies: topic-comment structure clearly plays a role in sign order. Furthermore, the visual nature of signing often means that it makes little sense to speak of an ordering of signs, as two different signs can be used simultaneously. A classic example of this is found in denoting spatial relations, where signs

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are used to replicate real-world relations. In such cases, the hands which form the signs for objects, beings, places, etc. are positioned relative to one another so as to mimic the actual locations of the referents themselves. This summary of word order presupposes a distinction in parts of speech, but at the moment there is no indication that any such distinction would have a morphological basis in RSL. In their citation forms, native deaf signers make no morphological distinction between parts of speech. In fact, Zaitseva (1988: 93ff.) argues strongly against positing parts of speech for RSL. There are groups of apparently synonymous signs, such as the base IGRAT', meaning 'actor', 'act/play', or 'theater'. All three are signed identically. They can be differentiated in speech by the addition of classifiers (e.g. IGRAT' + PERSON-CLASSIFIER = 'actor', IGRAT' + PLACE-CLASSIFIER = 'theater') but these classifiers are used only very rarely, if at all. Such signs fall into the general categories of Action and Instrument (GLADIT' 'to iron' and UTJUG 'iron'), Action-Actor-Instrument (XODIT' NA LYZHAX 'to ski' - LYZHNIK 'skier'

LYZHI

'skis'), of Object and Property

(BOGATSTVO 'riches', BOGATYJ 'rich', BOGATET' 'to become rich'). There is no evidence that these are distinguished by the kinds of variations in movement identified for other sign languages. 2 A related theoretical issue is the existence of personal pronouns in RSL. A number of recent studies have questioned their existence in Swedish Sign Language (Ahlgren 1990) and in ASL (Lillo-Martin & Klima 1990). Meier (1990) posits a morphological first-person plural; but see also Stokoe (1991). The argument goes something like this: personal pronouns are defined by discourse roles, so that, in English, I, first-person singular, denotes the speaker, and you, second-person, the addressee. They are shifters as defined by Jakobson (1957/1971), in the sense that their actual reference shifts depending upon who is speaking and who is listening at a given moment. Significantly, in sign lan2.The existence of parts of speech in any sign language was not recognized until Supalla and Newport (1978), which shows clear and regular contrasts in form for 100 noun-verb pairs in ASL.

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guages like Swedish SL and ASL (or RSL, for that matter), the personal pronouns are used regardless of the discourse role of the referents. In other words, their use is dependent upon spatial location. Meier (1990) argues for the existence of a first-person plural pronoun inasmuch as its use is not dependent upon the location of the referent. In ASL this is an exclusive first-person plural, that is, it is used to signal the signer and at least one other person who is not participating in the conversation. Yet Lillo-Martin and Klima (1990) argue against his hypothesis, asserting that ASL has one PRONOUN form which is not marked for person, although since publication of that article, Lillo-Martin (personal communication) has come to agree with Meier's position. This debate raises some interesting theoretical issues. All known spoken languages have some system of personal pronouns, although they vary greatly in their complexity. Anderson and Keenan (1985: 263) assert that all known languages morphemically distinguish between the first-person singular and at least one first-person plural form. Putting Meier (1990) aside for the moment, we are now forced to reexamine current notions of language universals, where by universal I mean a property or feature that is shared by all known languages. It would seem that either the sign language data invalidate the universal, or we need to posit separate universals for sign languages and spoken languages. Neither of these solutions is very satisfactory. The very pervasiveness of personal pronouns in spoken languages testifies to their salience. There is, of course, another solution, and that is to reexamine our definition of personal pronouns. A definition compatible to both sign and spoken languages would be something like this: first-person singular indicates self-reference and second-person indicates addressee. Even in sign languages these signs are not, in the strictest sense, simply locative: if I change location in the course of a conversation (i.e. change seats or walk around the room), I will continue to point to myself to index myself.

Verb categories: tense, aspect & mood Verb tense is generally not marked in RSL (see Zaitseva 1981, 1987). It is more usual to establish a temporal framework in which actions and events are understood to have temporal refer-

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ence. Such a framework can be established by citing specific dates, through the use of temporal adverbs, or by marking the initial verb in the past. There do exist two different sets of markings for tense. The first of these involves the sign denoting the verbal action followed by the sign BYLO 'was' or BUDET 'will be' 3 for past and future, respectively. Thus, RABOTAT' BYLO ('work' + 'was') can be glossed as 'worked', RABOTAT' BUDET ('work' + 'will') as 'will work'. The second way for marking tense is through the use of temporal adverbs SEGODNJA 'today', ZAVTRA 'tomorrow', VCHERA 'yesterday' which can again immediately follow the verbal sign. Interestingly, RSL can mark a distant past with the sign DAVNO 'long ago', which contrasts to signs marked with BYLO, a less distant past. But none of these is obligatory and so it is probably best to consider such signs temporal markers instead of morphological, grammatical tense markers. Verb aspect can be marked by the use of certain signs. A completed aspect is marked by either the sign ZAKONCHENO 'finished' or GOTOVO 'ready'. The distribution of these signs with relationship to one another remains to be determined: there is no current indication of whether they are in complementary or overlapping distribution. Zaitseva and Frumkina (1981: 17) state that the "sign ZAKONCHENO emphasizes that it is possible to go on to another action, while GOTOVO accents the result of the action." Another sign ESHCHE NE 'not yet', is used for an action that is incomplete at the moment of speech but whose completion is anticipated by the signer, as in (2)

JA OBEDAT' ESHCHE NE 'I still haven't eaten' not yet I eat

In Russian there is a high correlation between predicates signaling completed single actions and the perfective aspect. The perfective aspect is also used for completed serialized actions. 3.These glosses are the 3rd person sing. forms of Russian byt' 'to be.' Russian forms a periphrastic future with the future tense forms of byt'plus imperfective infinitives, but does not form any periphrastic past construction. In fact bylo does not occur as a past auxiliary in Russian.

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Preliminary evidence for RSL suggests that these two functions of the perfective are distributed between the signs ZAKONCHENO and GOTOVO, but that the aspectual system of RSL is markedly different from that of spoken Russian. Deaf signers have a difficult time mastering the aspectual system of spoken Russian and often interpret it solely in terms of signaling durativity or repetition (Kislicina 1988), which are two of the functions attributed to the imperfective aspect. RSL signs also undergo aspectual modulations like those of ASL as identified by Klima and Bellugi (1979). Repetition of the sign can signal repetition of an action, as in example (1) above: JA XODIT', XODIT', XODIT' 'I went and went and went'. The sign can also be modulated to indicate the level of intensity of an action; e.g. BIT' 'to beat' can be modulated to denote 'beat hard', 'beat lightly', and so on. Intensification can also be signaled by using two hands to sign what is normally (i.e. in its citation or unmarked form) a one handed sign, as in (3)

MY BYLO XOROSHO, VESELO, INTERESNO 1st pl was good fun interesting 'It was really, really good, fun and interesting for us'

In this example the three signs XOROSHO, VESELO and INTERESNO were all signed using both hands to indicate a high degree of intensity, although the citation forms of XOROSHO and INTERESNO are with one hand, and VESELO is normally signed with only one hand as well. The exact number of aspectual modulations in RSL is yet to be determined. This has direct bearing on the question of the existence of parts of speech raised above. Can all signs undergo the same kinds of aspectual modulations? Thus far it is clear that signs can be reduplicated to indicate, at the very least, plurality, iteration, and intensification. The issue is whether signs that are notionally noun-like or notionally verb-like are subject to the same modulations, or do such modulations signal parts of speech in any kind of regular and predictable way? It seems that signs that are semantically verbs and adjectives do modulate in the same ways. This is not, in and of itself, surprising, given the fact that there is a fair amount of morphological cross-over between

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adjectives and nouns in spoken languages; e.g. in Japanese, where adjectives regularly take verbal inflections. RSL has formal means for marking the imperative and conditional moods (see Zaitseva & Frumkina 1981). The imperative mood is made from the sign PROSHU (which can be glossed as 'I request' or 'I command') plus the citation form of the sign, so that PROSHU KUPIT' 'I ask' + 'to buy' can best be glossed with an imperative, 'buy', as in: (4)

JABLOKO PROSHU KUPIT' apple I request to buy 'Buy [some] apples'

The sign PROSHU is regularly used in those contexts where one would (semantically) expect an imperative. A conditional mood is formed from three signs: ESLI 'if' + the citation form of the sign + UDACHA, meaning something like 'success' or 'have luck'.

Negation & negative incorporation One interesting feature of RSL is negation. The negative marker NE regularly follows the negated sign, in distinction to spoken Russian and Signed Russian, where it obligatorily precedes what is in the scope of the negation. In addition, for some lexical items, the negation is incorporated into the base sign. Similar processes have been identified in ASL and FSL (see Woodward & De Santis 1977) and in BSL (Deuchar 1981). In these three languages negative incorporation involves an outward twisting motion of the hand. This same kind of motion is seen in RSL ZNAT' 'know' and NE-ZNAT' 'not-know', or the signs LJUBIT' 'love' as opposed to NE-LJUBIT' 'not love'. But for some signs the negation is marked very differently. For example, there can be some modification of the corresponding positive sign, as in UMET' 'know how' versus the negative NE-UMET' 'not know how'. Here a positive one-handed sign is signed with two hands in the negative, and the handshape changes from G to V. The motion and initial and final locations are the same for both the positive and negative signs. A striking example is the difference between the signs XOTET' 'want' and NE-XOTET' 'not-want'. XOTET' is signed with the extended fingers of the B-hand, bent at the first joint (the let-

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ter F in the Cyrillic manual alphabet), coming to rest at the left side of the chest region. NE-XOTET' is signed with the 5 hand under the chin, palm down, which moves from right to left, ending with the fingers pointing upward. Such negative incorporation occurs with a limited number of signs. Thus far I have identified 13 such lexicalized negatives (see Appendix 2), which all denote such concepts as liking, knowing, and thinking. A number of these are standardized and listed in the Russian Sign dictionary (Gejl'man 1975).

Conclusion This brief article has but sketched some aspects of the grammar and use of Russian Sign Language, and in so doing, has raised more questions than it has answered. Much of what has been said here is speculative. It has been my intention to add to the growing body of knowledge of the world's various sign systems, and to spark interest in the study of the sign languages and the deaf community of the USSR.

REFERENCES Ahlgren, I. 1990 Deictic pronouns inSwedish &Swedish Sign Language. In Fischer &Siple, 167-174. Anderson, S. & E.Keenan 1985 Deixis, in Language Typology &Syntactic Description. vol. 3:, Shopen, ed., NY &London: Cambridge University Press, 259-308. Deuchar, M. 1981 Variation in British Sign Language. InWoll et al., 109119. 1977 Sign Language Diglossia in a British Deaf Community, Sign Language Studies 17, 347-356. Ferguson, C. 1959 Diglossia, Word 15, 325-340. Fischer, S.& P.Siple (eds.) 1990 Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research: I Linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Geji'man, I. 1981 Daktilogija. Leningrad: LVI VOG. 1975 Specificheskie sredstva obshchenija gluxix. Daktilogija i mimika. (four volumes) Leningrad: LVI VOG. Jakobson, R. 1957 Shifters, verbal categories &the Russian verb. In Selected Writings of Roman Jakobson, vol. 2,130-147. The Hague: Mouton [1971]. Kislicina 1. 1988 Osobennosti vyrazhenija vremennyx otnoshenij v slovesnoj rechi gluxix uchashchixsja. Defektologiya 3, 24-31. Klima, E.& U.Bellugi 1979 The Signs of Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Kyle, J.& B.Woll 1985. Sign Language: The Study of Deaf People &Their Language. NY & London: Cambridge University Press. Lawson, L. 1981 The role of sign in the structure of the deaf community. In Woll et al., 166-177. Lillo-Martin, D.& E. Klima 1990 Pointing out differences: ASL pronouns insyntactic theory. InFischer &Siple, eds., 190-210. Meier, R. 1990 Person deixis inAmerican Sign Language. InFischer & Siple, 175-190. Stokoe, W. 1970 Sign language diglossia, Studies in Linguistics 21, 2741 1972 Semiotics &Human Sign Languages. The Hague: Mouton. 1991 Review of Fischer &Siple, eds., Sign Language Studies 70, 83-88. -----.

, D. Casterline,

& C. Croneberg

1976 A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles. [2nd. edn.] Silver Spring, MD: Linstok Press. Supalla, T & E. Newport 1978 How many seats in a chair? In Understanding Language through Sign Language Research, Siple, ed. NY: Academic Press, 91-132.

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Woll, B., J.Kyle &M. Deuchar (eds.) 1981 Perspectives on British Sign Language &Deafness. London: Croom Helm. Woodward, J.&S. DeSantis 1977 Negative Incorporation in French &American Sign Language, Language in Society 6, 379-388. Zaitseva, Galina L. 1978 Ponimanie i vosproizvedenie gluximi uchashchimisja vechernix shkol soderzhanija teksta, peredannogo zhestovoj rech'ju, Defektologija 5, 9-18. 1981 Ispol'zovanie zhestovoj rechi na urokax literatury v vechernix shkolax gluxix i slaboslyshashchix. Uchebno-metodicheskoe Posobie. Leningrad: VOG. 1987 Metody izuhenija sistemy zhestovogo obshchenija gluxix, Defektologija 1, 3-11. [1988 Zestovaja rech' v sisteme obuchenija i vospitanija vzroslyx gluxix uchashchixsja. Dissertacija na soiskanie uchenoj stepeni doktora pedagogicheskix nauk. Upublished doctoral dissertation). Moscow Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, Scientific Research Institute of Defectology.] ----- &R. Frumkina 1981 Psixolingvisticheskie aspekty izuchenija zhestovogo jazyka, Defektologija 1, 14-21. &---N.Slezina 1971 Mimiko-zhestovaja rech' gluxix. In I.M. Solov'ev, Z.I. Sif, T.V. Rozanova, N.V. Jashkova, eds. 240-248 Moscow: Pedagogika.

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Appendix 1: Russian manual alphabet

i

tu

f

t

ju

soft sign

j

X

Y

k

c

hard sign

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Appendix 2: Lexicalized negatives

Positive

*

Negative

English gloss

DAT'

NE-DAT

'give'

LJUBIT'

'NE-LJUBIT'*

'love'

MOC'

NE-MOC'*

'be able'

MOZNO

NE-MOZNO

'possible'

NRAVIT'SJA

NE-NRAVIT'SJA

'like'

NUZNO

NE-NUZNO

'necessary'

PONJAL

NE-PONJAL

'understood'

PRAVILNO

NEPRAVILNO*

'right'correct'

UMET'

NE-UMET'*

'know how'

XOTET

NE-XOTET'*

'want'

ZASTAT'

NE-ZASTAT'

'find'

ZNAT'

'NE-ZNAT'*

'know'

BUDU

NE-BUDU

Comments

lexicalized in Russ. nel'zja 'impossible)

lexicalized in R. nepravil'no 'incorrect'

future marker

Signs marked with an asterisk are listed in Gejl'man (1975).

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Note Research for this project was funded by grants from the University of California Chancellor's Patent Fund and from FulbrightHays, and a grant from the International Research and Exchanges Board, with funds provided by the Andrew W.Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the U.S. Department of State. None of these organizations is responsible for the views expressed here. A pilot study was conducted in Berkeley, California in the spring of 1987 with deaf Russians living in the San Francisco Bay Area. I subsequently abandoned data collected at that time because the informants exhibited significant interference from ASL. I spent the fall of 1988 in Moscow and St. Petersburg doing fieldwork. In addition to taping spontaneous texts, I collected the citation forms of approximately 1000 signs. These were videotaped, transcribed onto index cards and entered into a data base created for the Macintosh computer by Emilio Mill;n. I would like to thank the members of the Moscow Institute of Defectology, the Gertsen Institute of St. Petersburg, and the All Russian Federation of the Deaf. All data were checked by Elizabeth Gill. Ljudmila Andreeva, Johanna Nichols, Barry Scherr, Vladimir Ljubovsky, and Galina Zaitseva provided invaluable advice. Comments on notation used in this article: capital letters designate the Russian word which corresponds to the RSL sign; this is followed by an English gloss. Where relevant I have also given, in square brackets, the sign notation from Stokoe, Casterline and Croneberg (1976), since that will be most readily recognized by readers of Sign Language Studies, and have given handshapes based on the manual ASL alphabet. However, one major drawback to that notation for RSL is that the handshapes are based on the ASL manual alphabet. This masks some of the similarities between RSL and Russian, which is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. A notation system for RSL would ideally be based on Cyrillic. See Appendix 1 for the manual Russian alphabet. Where I cite a specific form of spoken Russian, that is given in italics.

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Lenore Grenoble is an Assistant Professor at Dartmouth College. She teaches in the Russian Department and in the Linguistics Program. Her Ph.D. is from the University of California, Berkeley. Her address is: Russian Department, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755 (E-mail: [email protected])