Prosodic Constituency and Intonation in a Sign Language

In natural communication, the medium through which language is transmitted plays an important and systematic role. Sentences are broken up rhythmically into chunks; certain elements receive special stress; and, in spoken language, intonational tunes are superimposed onto these chunks in particular ways -all resulting in an intricate system of prosody. Investigations of prosody in Israeli Sign Language (ISL) demonstrate that sign languages have comparable prosodic systems to those of spoken languages, although the phonetic medium is completely different. Evidence for the prosodic word, the phonological phrase, and the intonational phrase in ISL is examined here. New support is offered for the claim that facial expression in sign languages corresponds to intonation in spoken languages, and the term superarticulation is coined to describe this system in sign languages. Interesting formal differences between the intonational tunes of spoken language and the superarticulatory arrays of sign language are shown to offer a new perspective on the relation between the phonetic basis of language, its phonological organization, and its communicative content.