Qu’entend-on par « langues des signes » ? Quelles sont leurs spécificités ? Quel est l’intérêt des langues signées pour la linguistique ? Alors que les sciences du langage se sont considérablement développées durant ces dernières décennies, permettant de mieux comprendre le fonctionnement des langues et leurs variations, les langues des signes posent encore beaucoup de questions notamment pour la typologie des langues. L’objectif de cet article est de montrer que la langue des signes française (LSF), au-delà de ses spécificités structurelles et fonctionnelles, partage des caractéristiques typologiques que l’on retrouve dans certaines familles de langues vocales ainsi que dans des langues écrites de type logographiques.
What do we mean by ‘sign languages’? What are the specificities of sign languages? In what way; might sign languages contribute to general linguistics? Linguistics has undergone remarkable developments during the last decades, however Sign languages constitute a challenge particularly for the field of linguistic typology. The aim of this paper is to show that, beyond its structural and functional specificities, French Sign Language (langue des signes française, LSF), shares many typological characteristics found in many spoken languages of the World as well as in some written logographic systems.General typology sheds new light on Sign languages and shows that beyond functional specificities related to the visual-gestural modalities, this language displays a number of morphological and syntactic characteristics attributed to many spoken languages. There is allegedly at least 136 Sign languages in the World but some sources provide a much higher figure of nearly three hundred. The genetic classifications of Sign languages are still imprecise and the grouping of SL into families are not widely accepted. A great number of SLs are not mutually intelligible. SLs are minority languages without precise geographic location. They are silent languages that share some features of the written logographic systems but do not have any written system. SL makes use of two entirely different types of “signs”: standard signs and transfers. Signs may be analyzed according to several parameters. Each area of the signing space is significant. Sign languages are spatial and « situational ». The preferred syntactic order in LSF is: Agent-Patient Predicate (« SOV »). Concerning lexical categories, it is necessary to distinguish three categories in LSF: nouns, verbs and to a lesser extent, adjectives. Other categories such as adverbs or adpositions play a marginal role. LSF does not have any grammatical gender or article. Number is optional. There are various types of pronouns which are essentially marked through pointing signs and eye-gaze. Among the typological features that we discuss in this article, we can recognize classifiers or pro-forms, nominal incorporation, various verb classes, the high semantic resolution of some verbs, the absence of non-finite forms of verbs, the absence of copula as well as the adjectival category. The list of typological characteristics presented here is of course not exhaustive. Moreover, in order to allow a typological comparison with spoken languages, we focused on « Standard signs » and did not discuss in depth iconicity, which is a fundamental feature of LSF and other sign languages. In sharp contrast with the clichés and stereotypes shared by the general public as well as by a number of linguists, LSF has a complex grammar which has not been described in detail. This paper strives to show the necessity of a typological approach for the analysis and description of LSF, but it also demonstrates the great interest of this language for general typology. Let’s hope that this overview of categories in LSF will contribute to draw attention to sign languages from a growing number of linguists and particularly typologists. These languages are often forgotten in the general discussion about Human language despite the fact that they offer a great challenge for linguistic theories as well as other fields of Human sciences such as sociology, anthropology, psychology and epistemology.
