triple duty—nouns, verbs, and adverbs in asl
DID YOU KNOW? The number or quality of repeated movements within a sign can mean the difference between a noun, verb, or adverb, or provide multiple kinds of information simultaneously. This grammatical feature means ASL is often more economical than spoken language.
NOUN: Repeat the sign’s movement twice using a small range of motion. For example, the pointer and middle fingers are tapped against each other to make the sign “chair.”
VERB: The sign’s movement is made only once, using a larger range of motion. Sometimes this movement is altered to more closely mirror the real-life action （see: “cup” → “drink”）。 Here the pointer and middle fingers of one hand are set on the other to make the verb “to sit.” Greater force and a stern facial expression can form the command “sit down.”
ADVERB: Some signs can be imbued with descriptive information by tweaking or adding movement. For example, to add the information for a long period of time, a sign can be adjusted to incorporate a slow, circular motion （see: working, sitting）。
NOW YOU TRY! Using the base sign study, tell a partner about a time when you had to study hard or for a long time.
charlie remembered the earliest years of her education with a certain fondness—less unsupervised time and therefore less bullying, snack breaks, and coloring and scissor skills she could ace alongside her peers. But the language acquisition the doctors had promised post-implant had been slow to materialize. For a while she made progress in a little white room, where she sat at a table across from a well-intentioned blond lady who dealt largely in spit. Charlie had spent hours with that woman, learning about mouth shapes and airflow by blowing out candles, or holding her nose, or pressing an upside-down spoon on her tongue. But outside the confines of the therapist’s office, so many sounds were still inscrutable. Her classrooms were noisy, and she couldn’t find the words they’d practiced out there, amid the din.
It started to show. The students began learning to read, spell, even add via call-and-response, a mire of sounds through which Charlie waded with trepidation. Her teachers scolded her when she was slow or off-task, raised concerns at parent conferences about whether she had “additional disabilities.” Charlie did not know how to explain that she couldn’t possibly find the answers when she didn’t know the questions.
She became prone to what her mother called “spells.” Her teachers called them “behaviors,” as if any action from a child beyond total compliance was implicitly bad. Charlie, of course, called them nothing at all, which was part of the problem.
She didn’t remember much about the outbursts now, just flashes: her teacher trying to peel her from the tile floor while Charlie thrashed in her grip, the heat of her tears and phlegm midtantrum, and most of all that burning feeling that ran from her forehead straight to the pit of her stomach, when the word you need is on the tip of your tongue but you can’t quite wrangle it. Except for Charlie it was all the words. And this was how she’d come to do a stint in special ed.
In the special ed room, Charlie spent most of her time alone. She was given a desk, workbooks, pretzels, and water in a spill-proof cup with a spout that looked like it was for someone much younger. Perhaps they originally had other plans for her, but day in and day out the teacher and aides were consumed by the room’s myriad emergencies—feeding and washing and toilet training, the constant sidelong minding of a boy who was prone to banging his front teeth against the cinder-block wall when he was upset.
One of her new classmates had a flip-book wallet full of little pictures that she wore hooked to her belt loop—cartoon images of a toilet, various foods and drinks, classroom toys. Charlie liked the bright, bold pictures and wondered if someone might make such a book for her, but they never did. Some afternoons the girl would appear at Charlie’s side and show her a picture of Lego, and the two would retreat to the circle time carpet and build a tower. Besides her, Charlie didn’t interact much with the other students, save for one kid who’d scratched her when she’d unwittingly taken his favorite seat at the craft table. The teacher had sent Charlie down to the nurse with a note pinned to her shirt requesting antiseptic, harsh stuff that chapped her cheek.
At first Charlie’s own “behaviors” continued, too, meltdowns in the face of unfathomable phonics workbooks. The special ed program was equipped for these moments; Charlie was placed in the Quiet Room—an empty closet lined with blue gymnasium mats. Charlie hated the Quiet Room. Quiet was not hard for her to come by and more of it certainly didn’t calm her. The closet door had a small window, but it was too high for Charlie to see out of, and she worried that her teachers would be distracted by some crisis and forget her in there. She knew the only way to keep from being trapped forever was to stop the spells, so bit by bit she learned to swallow them, curl her toes inside her sneakers and clamp her back teeth down hard when she was angry. Her visits to the room became fewer and fewer, but with little instructional time and no friends, her academic progress was still bleak. Some days, the speech therapist was the only person she talked to at all.
In a surprising twist, it was her mother’s preoccupation with appearances that eventually saved her. People talked in Colson, and a neighbor had seen Charlie at the bus stop in her special ed–issued orange safety vest. The looks, the gossip, the prying questions about the state of Charlie’s mind—it was too much for her mother, and eventually she stormed the school to have it all reversed. She was met with little resistance—the special ed teachers themselves had been against the placement from the start—and soon Charlie was returned to the mainstream classroom. But her record bore the mark of her time away, and both students and teachers took note. Her classmates focused their attention on her in ways she would rather they didn’t, and the teachers did the opposite. In a public school strapped for resources, extra tutoring and empathy had to be rationed, and they could not risk wasting it on her. They resigned themselves to passing her on to the next grade until she was gone.
How might her life have been different if she had always gone to River Valley? Charlie thought as she and her father joined the move-in queue. Alight with activity, the campus looked different than it had when they’d come at night. The main drive was crowded, the surrounding lawns busy with smaller children and nervous parents sitting close together in the grass, older kids playing soccer or passing cellphones back and forth. And everywhere there was the flurry of hands and arms in flight, telling tales of the summer, no doubt, though Charlie wouldn’t have been able to understand them at that speed even if she was close enough. The enchantment cast by those large stone buildings the night of their first sign class was diluted somewhat by the activities around them, but in the multitude of signs, Charlie saw a different kind of magic.
She and her father collected her ID card and a folder containing her room assignment, class schedule, and another campus map, then made it to the loading zone in front of the girls’ dorm, where a dormkeeper pushed a canvas laundry cart their way. Charlie stood beside the trunk of the car trying to look useful as her father unloaded her two suitcases, backpack stuffed with school supplies, the trio of clear plastic bags containing her new sheets, duvet, and pillows, a shower caddy, laundry bag containing towels, hair dryer, and new galoshes, and the unopened box that held the laptop her parents had bought her as a “going away present.”