ASL Puts Grammar in the Air Around the Signer

American Sign Language is not signed English. It has its own grammar, and one of its most structurally unusual features is that it encodes grammatical relationships using the space in front of the signer's body.

A signer introduces a referent — say, a friend named Maria — and assigns her a location in the signing space, perhaps to the left. From that point forward, pointing to the left means 'her,' even if Maria is not physically present. The space itself holds the grammatical role, functioning like a three-dimensional pronoun system.

Verb agreement works the same way. To sign 'Maria gave it to John,' a signer moves the sign for 'give' from Maria's established location on the left toward John's established location on the right. The movement of the sign through space carries the grammatical information that English encodes through word order or case markers. Reverse the movement and the meaning reverses — now John gives it to Maria.

Linguists William Stokoe and Ursula Bellugi were among the first, in the 1960s and 70s, to demonstrate that sign languages are fully structured linguistic systems, not inventories of gestures or simplified representations of spoken language. Stokoe's 1960 monograph on ASL structure was initially mocked by many in the Deaf education establishment — within two decades it had become foundational to sign language linguistics.