This paper discusses the role of contact in sonority in ASL. Contact is considered to have little or no effect on visual sonority in ASL and thus not involved in sonority hierarchy at all, or is ranked at a lower position in the hierarchy. A careful scrutiny of signs of a certain type, however, suggests that contact of the dominant hand with part of the body or with the non-dominant hand augments the sonority of movement which constitutes the syllable nucleus. ASL has neither signs with partial handshape change only nor partial orientation change only; this is because the sonority of partial change is not high enough to constitute the syllable nucleus. There exists an exception, however: partial-change signs in which the dominant hand contacts with part of the body or the nondominant hand. These signs imply that contact augments the sonority of partial movement and makes it eligible for a well-formed syllable nucleus. This fact shows that contact is not a non-sonorous element at all, but rather, one of the elements that must be involved in sonority formation. This paper proposes a new sonority hierarchy that is based on visibility. The reasons that sonority should be based on visibility and not on articulation or joints which articulate movement are (1) contact would not be taken into account if sonority were determined only based on articulatory aspects, and (2) there seems to be no one-to-one relation between perceptual (i.e., visual) and articulatory correlates as seen in oral language. Battison’s type II and III signs and two-handed signs with both handshapes different and both hands moving also support this visibility-based sonority.

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This paper reviews how the body lean focuses constituents in ASL, as reported by Wilbur and Patschke (1998), and then examines parallel JSL data for similar non-manual focusing strategies. We show that while focusing strategies types in sign languages use the same channels as spoken languages, the focus types appear to yield varying methods of focusing patterns which are language specific. The contrast of ASL and JSL patterns show that these methods are not mode specific. Topics for further study are suggested.

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