ABSTRACT
In the sentences in Israeli Sign Language presented so far with their English translations, one thing is immediately clear: the order of words in a sentence is completely different from that of English. It is also completely different from the word order of Hebrew. This is not particularly surprising; among other things, languages are distinguished from one another by the order of their words. In English, for example, the adjective comes before the noun it describes (a blue ball), while in Hebrew the opposite is the case (kadur kaXol ‘ball blue’). In Biblical Hebrew, sentences typically begin with the verb followed by the subject of the sentence, while in Modern Hebrew the subject tends to precede the verb, as in English. Languages are also distinguished from one another by the degree of freedom they have in determining word order. Hebrew, for example, is much more flexible in this regard as illustrated by the following literally translated examples:
110a. All the neighborhood children ate sushi at the Japanese restaurant yesterday. (subject-verb-object: acceptable in Hebrew and in English)
b. Falafel they eat only in the neighborhood. (object-subject-verb: common in Hebrew, unusual but acceptable in English)
c. *Yesterday ate all the neighborhood children sushi in the Japanese restaurant. (verb-subject-object: acceptable in Hebrew but decidedly ungrammatical in English)
Because ISL is an autonomous language, entirely different from Hebrew, we can expect that its word order will also differ to some extent from that of Hebrew. Yet often the word order in ISL does not differ just ‘to some extent’ from the ambient spoken language. The ISL word order is sometimes so unusual and unfamiliar that it appears on first encounter not to follow any rules at all.
