ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book is about natural sign languages, the languages of deaf communities that naturally emerge when signers are together. It focuses on American Sign Language (ASL), the language used in the United States and most parts of Canada. The book provides an overview of the variants of ASL that are used by Deaf community members with different backgrounds, noting those features that might be related to particular types of signing or signers. It summarizes sign language research in a number of areas. The book shows what research has said about the grammatical structure of ASL and other sign languages. It discusses implicit rules for the formation of words and sentences. The book shows that ASL displays very specific patterns for marking negation with different negative signs, and that the placement of a negative sign has great consequences for the interpretation of a sentence.
