When we think of the legacy of classical antiquity, we think first of Greek art, Greek drama and Greek philosophy; when we turn to what we owe to Rome, what come to mind are probably Roman roads and Roman law. The Greeks speculated a great deal about the nature of law and about its place in society but the actual laws of the various Greek states were not highly developed in the sense that there was little science of law. The Romans, on the other hand, did not give much attention to the theory of law; their philosophy of law was largely borrowed from the Greeks. What interested them were the rules governing an individual's property and what he could make another person do for him by legal proceedings. Indeed the detailed rules of Roman law were developed by professional jurists and became highly sophisticated. The very technical superiority of its reasoning, which has made it so attractive to professional lawyers through the ages, has meant that Roman law is not readily accessible to the layman. Inevitably its merits have a less obvious appeal than art or roads. Yet over the centuries it has played an important role in the creation of the idea of a common European culture.

Most of what we know about ancient Roman law derives from a compilation of legal materials made in the sixth century ad on the orders of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian.

THE LAW OF THE TWELVE TABLES

When recorded history begins, Rome was a monarchy, but at the end of the sixth century bc the kings were expelled and a republic was established in their place. At this time, Rome was a small community on the left bank of the river Tiber not far from its estuary. Its people believed that they were descended from refugees from the city of Troy after its sack by the Greeks. Their law was a set of unwritten customs, passed on orally from one generation to the next, which were regarded as part of their folk heritage as Romans. These laws were applicable only to those who could claim to be Roman citizens (ius civile, law for cives, citizens).

In cases where the application of a customary rule to a particular case was doubtful, the interpretation of the college of pontiffs, a body of aristocrats responsible for maintaining the state religious cults, was decisive. The citizen body was divided into two social groups, the patricians, a relatively small group of propertied families of noble birth, and the plebeians, numerically larger but disadvantaged in various ways. The pontiffs were exclusively patrician and the plebeians naturally suspected that their pronouncements on the validity of particular acts and forms were not always entirely disinterested. The plebeians argued that if the customary law were written down in advance of cases arising, it would be to their advantage.

THE COMMENTATORS

Bartolus, who gave his name to the school which dominated the study of the civil law during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, was born in 1313 or 1314 in Sassoferrato, a small village in the Marches, and died in 1357. He began his studies of law, at the age of thirteen or fourteen, at Perugia under Cinus and later went on to Bologna, where he took his doctorate at the age of twenty. He was a judge in the small town of Todi and then devoted himself to teaching, first at Pisa and then at Perugia, where he died. His short life was completely absorbed by the law and his output was phenomenal: apart from treatises on particular topics, he wrote exhaustive commentaries on all parts of the Corpus iuris, which in the early printed editions fill nine folio volumes.

True, much of the material consisted of citation of his predecessors but Bartolus always added something of his own, usually a clear path through the thickets of earlier debates, indicating a practical solution to a problem. Under his influence the study of the civil law became less purely academic and more orientated towards the legal problems of the day. He and his followers continued to expound the texts in the form in which they were transmitted but their aim was no longer to explain the meaning of those texts as they stood.

In this chapter we will be considering the different uses of space in BSL, and the way this influences the use of verbs in BSL. We will discuss the difference between syntactic space and topographic space, using evidence from braindamaged deaf people as well as evidence from experiments with healthy deaf people. We will then think about the way these two types of space are used by the three groups of verbs that can be identified in BSL; namely plain verbs, agreement verbs, and spatial verbs. The division of these verbs is based upon the grammatical information they include. The use of space is one of the most important characteristics of BSL verbs and needs describing before we can talk about verb types any further.

SYNTACTIC AND TOPOGRAPHIC SPACE

Some linguists have claimed that there are two different types of space that are used in sign languages. Physically, the signing space is exactly the same, but the space is used in two very different ways by the language.

Topographic space recreates a map of the real world. It is a spatial layout in signing space of representations of things as they really are. For example, when we describe a local shopping area to someone in BSL, we place things in our signing space according to where these things really are in relation to other things.

‘BSL is a language that uses the hands to communicate instead of the tongue.’ This statement is only true up to a point, because other parts of the body are also very important in BSL. Signers actually look at each other's faces, not their hands, when communicating. This chapter will explore the role of nonmanual features in BSL, focusing especially on the role of the mouth, but also on the rest of the face, and the head.

There are many mouth patterns that convey grammatical and phonological information in BSL (see also chapter 9).

Although BSL is independent of English, it has been influenced by English, and has borrowed from English. One of the things it has borrowed is the mouth patterns from English words. BSL has not just borrowed randomly, though, and there are times when English mouth patterns are borrowed, and times when they are not. More importantly, BSL changes the English mouth patterns, so that when they are used, they are not always used as they are in English.

Understanding the use of mouth patterns in BSL is important. Knowing how and when to use appropriate mouth patterns is a difficult skill for learners of BSL.

This discussion of mouth patterns also reinforces the point that it is not possible to sign BSL and speak English at the same time, because we will see that there are many occasions when an English mouth pattern is inappropriate while signing BSL.

For much of the time, language is simply a vehicle for transmitting the thoughts of one person to another. There are times, however, when the language itself, rather than its message, becomes the focus of attention. This is particularly true when the language is used for poetry or jokes. In both these cases, the language user pays particular attention to the form of the language chosen. This final chapter will be concerned with the use of BSL in poetry, humour, and story-telling.

LINGUISTIC FEATURES OF BSL POETRY

Poems are a special part of many languages. One feature of poems is that they often carry a considerable amount of meaning in very few words. However, one of the most important features of a poem is that the language that is used is just as important as (or even more important than) the message in the poem.

There has been little published research on sign language poetry, and the few available linguistic descriptions are of ASL poems. However, the linguistic features seen in BSL poems are sufficiently similar to ASL for us to use the commentary upon ASL poems for consideration of BSL poetry.

The American researchers Edward Klima and Ursula Bellugi carried out an in-depth analysis of ASL and BSL haiku poems (short Japanese poems with a very strict syllable structure) in the 1970s.

Linguistics tries to find out the rules that explain what language users know, so that we can understand how language works.

People who know a language use it without thinking. They can use a language very well, and get it right nearly all of the time. But, if we ask them to tell us the rules of their language, they often find that they cannot because they have never had to think about it before. Most users of a language do not think in terms of ‘rules’ for their language and often do not stop to think about it. As sign linguists, we want to stop and think about language, most especially British Sign Language, so that we can find the rules that explain how the language works.

If we are to understand how BSL works, sign linguistics needs to ask questions like:

• Is BSL just a pantomime?

• Is sign language the same around the world?

• How do we ask a question in BSL?

• How do we say ‘no’ in BSL?

• What is the order of signs in BSL?

• Does BSL have adjectives and adverbs like English does?

• How do we show something happened a long time ago in BSL?

• Are there some handshapes that are not part of BSL?

• Can we sign with a straight face and give the full meaning?

• Do all signers sign in the same way in BSL, or are there differences?

Syntax is the term for the way that words or signs are put together to create meaningful sentences and phrases. Although there are conventions in written English to mark the beginnings and ends of sentences, there is no formal agreement on what a sentence is. It is very difficult to define a sentence, but most people have a rough feeling that they know a sentence when they see or hear one.

Although words have their own meanings, the order of words or signs in a language is just as important in relation to meaning. If words and signs are not combined according to the syntactic rules of the language, the meaning is either lost, changed, or becomes unclear.

Before we can address the syntax of BSL sentences in much depth, we need to consider the idea of ‘proforms’, and how and why BSL uses them. Understanding and using proforms in BSL is essential for the understanding of the syntax of BSL.

A proform is anything that refers to, and stands in the place of, something previously identified. The identification may have been made using a sign for the referent, or the referent may be present for all to see. For example, the sign CAR has a related proform (a ‘B’ hand (see Conventions for an explanation of this and other symbols)) that is used to provide more information about the location of the car and the action it is involved in.

In previous chapters we have discussed the ways signs are combined and changed in BSL grammar. Here we explore the basic ‘building-blocks’ of single signs. Signs, like any use of the body for communication, can be called gestures, but they form only a small set of the possible gestures that can be made, and they differ in specific ways from most gestures. We will begin by describing the elements which combine to form the signs of BSL and then discuss the relationship between gestures which are part of the language and gestures which are not.

In chapter 1 we discussed the design features of human language. One of those features is duality. A small set of basic meaningless features can be used to build up a large set of meaningful signs. The study of how these small units combine to create larger units is called phonology. An important principle of phonology is that it is not concerned with little variations which do not contribute to differences in meaning. For example, middle-aged female learners of BSL often keep their fingers together where other signers spread them, as in SIGN, but such variation is not ‘contrastive’, and therefore is not the concern of phonology (fig. 9.1). However, if SIGN was articulated with ‘A’ handshapes, it would no longer mean SIGN, it would mean ENGINE. So we can say that ‘A’ contrasts with ‘5’ and is therefore part of BSL phonology, as phonology is the study of the smallest contrastive units of language.

In this chapter we will continue our discussion of the origin of signs. We have already seen that they can be derived from a representation of the visual form of the referent, or created by metaphorical extension (often drawing on some visual metaphor). This chapter will consider several other mechanisms for creating signs in BSL, including new signs made by derivation. We will also consider signs that are not a permanent part of the BSL lexicon; they are created ad hoc, for the moment. We will also consider the use of simultaneous signs for creating new meanings.

The signs of BSL can be divided into those that are part of the ‘established’ lexicon, and those that are part of the ‘productive’ lexicon. Before we consider any more processes for creating signs, it is worth considering these two groups of signs.

English speakers have a large set of words to choose from, and they can combine these words together to make sentences. English creates new words by adding prefixes and suffixes, or by making compounds from two existing words, or by extending the meaning of a word to give it a new meaning. It can also borrow words from other languages. On the whole, though, these productive processes are not much used and English has a fairly large, fairly stable lexicon.

BSL is very different. In BSL, there are far fewer ‘basic signs’ fixed in the lexicon, but the process of using signs not in the established lexicon is much more important. The BSL/English Dictionary lists pictures of only 1,789 signs.

This chapter will address the different types of socially unacceptable language, why these are used and how. It will not deal with ‘rude’ or ‘coarse’ signs, except where it is necessary to give examples of particular linguistic points. Readers interested in taboo signs are referred to Martin Colville's Signs of a Sexual Nature, which is still the best source text for this area of BSL linguistics.

Coarse language is an important part of many languages, but it is traditionally not studied by many linguists. To a certain extent, this is because not much coarse language is written down. Also, many people see coarse language as something to use only with their friends, so they will not use it in front of a researcher.

This is particularly true of BSL. Many deaf people are reticent about using rude or coarse language in front of hearing people or any linguist doing research in the language. Some of this feeling may be related to the tradition that the only hearing people in contact with the Deaf community were missioners. Some ‘socially unacceptable’ signs are included in the BSL/English Dictionary. The makers of the dictionary had a responsibility to include these signs, although they also had a responsibility to note that these signs were unacceptable to many people. When the dictionary first came out, some people expressed disquiet because it contained a sign glossed as xJEW that many people found offensive.