Are home signs languages? An analysis of the syntactic productions of deaf people without input from a constituted sign language

Abstract

This study aims to investigate whether the communication systems that deaf people develop to communicate with their hearing family members, known as home signs, have argumentative structures that allow them to be considered a language. That said, we base ourselves on the concept of language from the generativist theoretical framework, specifically the Minimalist Program (MP), whose assumption is anchored in the Principles and Parameters (PP) approach, which postulates that we are endowed with a faculty of language (FL), whose initial stage is universal grammar (GU), which, in turn, is composed of universal principles and a set of parameters capable of regulating, organizing and generating our linguistic productions. Furthermore, this faculty of language is activated by a linguistic input that fixes and parameterizes this grammar. That said, this discussion is related to the hypothesis that guided this research, which is that even without the input of a pre-existing language, deaf individuals perform syntactically, in gestural-visual mode, according to a natural language standard, because they have an innate linguistic capacity, which is activated, in gestural communicative effort, in interaction with others and the world. In order to prove this hypothesis, we set out to identify whether the deaf manifestations in home signs contain verbs, arguments and adjuncts, in a subject-predicate or topic-comment pattern, observing which of these structures is more frequent. Next, we looked at the differences and similarities in syntactic structures in the signed productions of deaf people who have no contact with each other and questioned the nature of the input. To do so, it was used samples of natural speech in home signs of 05 (five) deaf people with their respective hearing family members, collected through filming/recording in dialogic-discursive situations in their family environment, which constitutes the corpus of the research. This data was transcribed using the Libras writing system (Sel) developed by Lessa-de-Oliveira (2012, 2019 and 2023) and with the use of glosses. The analysis found 29 (twenty-nine) simple argument structures; 10 (ten) grammatical sentence structures with complements and adjuncts; 35 (thirty-five) coordinated sentences and 07 (seven) subordinate sentences. In addition to these findings, interrogative sentences, imperatives, negatives, syntactic constructions with small clauses, ellipses, and other resources were identified. We were unable to measure the most typical constituent order, but there was a high incidence of SVO and OV sentences. The study also showed some grammatical similarities between the sentences of deaf people who do not have contact between themselves, such as ordering, the marking of negation, the use of autosaturated verbs, grammatical facial expressions, classifiers, emblems with verb category marks and, above all, the absence of morphological inflectional marks. Isolated findings include the use of idiomatic expressions and the possible polarity marker "nem." Based on this evidence, we assume that the sign production of these deaf people presents universal grammatical structures that can contribute to the assumption of language status, starting to consider them familiar sign languages, configuring themselves as the first language of the deaf participants in this thesis. Therefore, we consider that a pre-existing language input is not decisive for the acquisition of a first language, and the faculty of language can be activated by linguistic elements of a nascent language in the communicative effort related to the interaction that each subject experiences. Finally, given the results found, we encourage new discussions such as the possibility of acquiring Libras as a second language for deaf people, presenting provocations for new investigations in the field of linguistics and in the educational field.