A Comparative Study Of Signed Chinese And Chinese Sign Language:a Sociolinguistic Perspective

With the development of society, communication between Deaf people and hearing persons has made a great improvement than ever before, which enables the two groups involved to have immense contact. Anyhow. Deaf people are living in a hearing society, and no one can live isolated from the society. Moreover, many Deaf children are born by hearing parents, and they are raised in a hearing family. All these have made the contact between Chinese Sign Language (CSL) and the Chinese language constant and immense. So far, however, few linguistic studies have been conducted concerning the contact between CSL and Chinese, as well as that between Deaf community and hearing community in China. To make up this gap, the current thesis conducts a fieldwork-based comparative study of Signed Chinese and CSL from a sociolinguistic perspective, with an aim to illuminate the contact between CSL and the Chinese language.In this project, the data were collected by videotaping informants’ signing of words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. All the informants are Deaf students from Chongqing Normal University, who exhibit different proficiency in CSL and Chinese. Then the collected data were compared with the words listed in Chinese Sign Language, a book edited and published by the Chinese Deaf Association so as to unify and standardize the sign language used in mainland China, supported with some clips of sign language interpretation in the program Focus On produced by CCTV.By adopting the model proposed by Lucas (2000) as the framework, the present study analyzes the various contact-induced language phenomena in Chinese Deaf community, and draws the following two conclusions:Firstly, the outcome of language contact in Chinese Deaf community is Chinese Contact Signing (CCS), which is a unique system that belongs to neither natural sign language nor the spoken language, and which has its own features in lexical forms, vocabulary, and syntactic structure.Secondly, Signed Chinese is a good example of CCS, differing from natural CSL in three aspects, namely, handshape, vocabulary, and syntax, among which syntax contributes to the major differences. It is a contact-induced, imbalanced, conventional, and functional system, yet it is not an independent language. Rather, it is a transitional and communicative language, and it cannot serve as an official language or be popularized as a standard language.Based on the above findings, it can be proposed that sign language interpreters should truly know CSL and understand the differences between Signed Chinese and CSL, so as to provide accurate interpretations. During the process of interpretation, they should follow the principles of CSL and Deaf culture, think from the perspective of the Deaf, and sign in a way that is accepted by most of Deaf persons so that the information transmission can be effective. At the meantime, both CSL and Signed Chinese should be employed properly concerning language teaching in Deaf education. The sign language teachers as well as Deaf teachers should choose their teaching language respectively according to different teaching requirements.Finally, the author proposes a framework for approaching contact-induced changes concerning sign-spoken language contact. That is, such contact concerns with asymmetrical bilingualism, yet stable or maintained bilingualism in Deaf communities. Only two languages are involved in such contact, the written form of the mainstream language and the sign language variety involved in the contact situation. The directionality of the influence is mainly from the mainstream language to the sign language variety. The changes are basically presented by those in phonology and morphology, namely handshape and vocabulary, yet syntactic change plays a determinative role in defining the resulting language system.