Acceso usuarios
Rachel Sutton-Spence
British Sign Language (BSL) exists surrounded by the powerful majority language, English, and is influenced by English. As a visual-gestural language, it is structurally radically different from English. In order to permit borrowing BSL needs to represent forms from a sound-based language in a vision-based language. The research described here details the influence of English on BSL at the syntactic, morphological, lexical and idiomatic, and phonological levels. It shows how BSL uses loan translations, fingerspelling, and the use of mouth patterns derived from English language spoken words to include elements from English.
