The study of phonological structure and patterns across languages is seen by contemporary phonologists as a way of gaining insight into language as a cognitive system. Traditionally, phonologists have focused on spoken languages. More recently, we have observed a growing interest in the grammatical system underlying signed languages of the deaf. This development in the field of phonology provides a natural laboratory for investigating language universals. As grammatical systems, in part, reflect the modality in which they are expressed, the comparison of spoken and signed languages permits us to separate those aspects of grammar which are modality-dependent from those which are shared by all human languages. On the other hand, modality-dependent characteristics must also be accounted for by a comprehensive theory of language. Comparing languages in two modalities is therefore of theoretical importance for both reasons: establishing modality-independent linguistic universals, and accounting for modality-dependent structure and organisation.

The assumption that there is a common set of linguistic principles underlying both spoken language and sign language phonology, which forms part of the human language capacity, is shared by most phonologists working on sign language. See Sandler (1993a) for an extensive discussion of these issues. But even though this assumption is reasonable, since both spoken and signed languages are products of the same human brain and fulfil the same function, it is not clear that theories of representation which have been proposed for spoken languages can be directly applied to the structure of sign languages. Such representations have been developed on the basis of the spoken language modality only. They are often so close to the phonetics of spoken languages that we cannot rule out the possibility that non-trivial aspects of them are modality-specific. Therefore, rather than, for example, attempting to test various competing (spoken language-based) theories of syllable structure, we must first investigate the structure of sign language in its own right. This strategy need not be pushed too far, however. In developing a model of signs we can benefit from general principles which have proved successful in the study of spoken languages, especially if these principles do not seem to be directly based on ‘spoken phonetics’.

It is generally accepted that there are three major categories of phonological elements in the signs of sign language: (i) the shape of the hand, (ii) the location of the hand on or near the body and (iii) the movement of the hand – either (a) movement of the fingers or palm at a single location or (b) movement of the whole hand along a path from one location to another. It has further been argued that each of these categories consists of hierarchically organised classes of features (Sandler 1987b, 1989a).

The purpose of this paper is to help define and limit the role that temporal ordering plays in morphophonemic representation, syllable structure and phrases in American Sign Language (ASL). First, I will list the ways in which temporal ordering plays a role in morphophonemic structures. Second, I will show that temporal ordering plays a limited role in ASL phrases. Third, I will argue that neither temporal ordering nor segmentation plays a role in syllables, and the bulk of this paper will be devoted to motivating this syllable template. Stokoe (1960) and Stokoe et al. (1965) proposed that ASL is organised according to simultaneous phonemes, but since Liddell (1984) the importance of temporally ordered structure in sign structure has been emphasised by many researchers (Liddell & Johnson 1989; Sandler 1986, 1989; Perlmutter 1990, 1992; Corina 1990a, b; to name a few).

This paper presents an analysis of the relationship between focus and the prosodic word (ω) in English. Using focus as a diagnostic, I will support the position that prosodic structure is built on a separate plane from morphological structure and that certain phonological processes are conditioned by prosodic bracketing (Booij & Rubach 1984, 1987; Nespor & Vogel 1986; Halle & Vergnaud 1987; Cohn 1989; Zec & Inkelas 1990; Kang 1992; Booij & Lieber 1993; Raffelsiefen 1993). More specifically, the proposal is that semantic analysability, focus and ω status coincide in a predictable manner on prefixes.

The theory of prosodic morphology (McCarthy & Prince 1986, 1990, 1993) maintains that various operations in morphology can refer to only a fixed set of prosodic categories. These operations include reduplication, infixation and various templatic systems. The prosodic categories are exhaustively listed in (1):

This is an extremely constrained theory, as it limits a wide variety of operations to just this list of eight types.