ROMAN LAW AND NATIONAL LAWS

In 1653 there appeared a book by the English civilian Arthur Duck on the use and authority of the Roman civil law in the realms of Christian princes (De usu et authoritate iuris civilis Romanorum in dominiis principum Christianorum). It is based on precise information about the extent to which the civil law had been received in different European countries and Duck was at pains to bring out the common ideas on the nature of law that those countries shared. Wherever one does not look merely at custom but seeks equity, he says, the laws of no nation are more suited than the civil law of the Romans, which contains the fullest rules concerning contracts, wills, delicts, judgments and all human actions.

The exact extent of the civil law component varied from country to country. Court practice (usus fori), as evidenced by collections of decisions, had for long reflected the particular amalgam of Roman civil law and customary law of the country or region. University teaching, on the other hand, had always remained tied to the civil law and ignored the customary element. By the middle of the seventeenth century the universities had to come to terms with the civil law as it was understood locally, and law faculties recognised national compounds of Roman and local law. In 1650 Michael Wexionius, professor in the university of Åbo (Turku) in Finland, then part of the Swedish kingdom, published an introduction to the study of Roman-Swedish civil law (iuris civilis Sveco-Romani).

ROMAN LAW AND GERMANIC LAW IN THE WEST

From the sixth century until the eleventh, a reference to Roman law in Western Europe was normally understood to be to the law of the so-called barbarian codes, in particular the Roman law of the Visigoths. These collections reflected not Roman law of the classical period but the ‘vulgar law’ of the fifth century. They served as quarries from which rules could be dug when required for smaller collections. Compared with the scope and complexities of Justinian's compilation, their contents reflected a low level of legal science, but even so they sometimes proved to be beyond the comprehension of those who consulted them in the sixth and seventh centuries.

In the early middle ages, the imperial system of courts, staffed by professional judges who represented a state machine that could enforce their decrees, disappeared. In its place were groups of freemen from the locality who sought to settle disputes in such a way that the disruption of community life would be minimised. The assemblies of freemen had to establish the customary rules relevant to the case before them. These rules were not applied rigidly but provided a background against which the dispute was to be settled, often by compromise. Instead of the sense of belonging to a world empire, the individual had more of the sense of being part of a community of people of similar ethnic origin with similar customary traditions.

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.