All language have rules of syntax silmilar in kind, if not in detail, to those of English, and sign languages are no exception. A signer is as capable as an oral speaker of distinguishing bog bites man from man bites dog thruogh the order of signing.
Many languages, including English, have a transformation that moves a direct object to the beginning of the sentence to draw particular attention to it, as in :
Many dogs my wife has rescued from the pound.
The transformation is called topicalisation because an object to ehich attention is drawn gegerally becomes the topic of the sentence or conversation. ( The deep structure underlying this sentence is My wife hase many dogs from the pound.)
In sign languages a similar reordering of signs accompanied by raising the eyebrows tilting the head upwards accomplishes the seme effect. The head motion and facial expressions of a signer function as markers of the special word order, much as intonation does in English, or the attachment of prefixes or suffixes might in other languages.
There are constrains on topicalisation similar to those on wh- preposing illustrated in a previous section. The following string is ungrammatical.
Canberra correspondent, John Howard attacked the Herald's.
Compare with the grammatical
The Herald's Canberra correspondent Jhon Howard attacked.
Similar constrain are foun in sign languages. An attempt to sign *Canberra correspondent, Jhon Howard attacked the Herald's would result in an ungrammatical sequence of signs. In thai, to show that an action is being done continuously, the auxiliary verb kamlang is inserted before the verb. Thus kin means 'eat' and kamlang kin means 'is eating'. In English, a form of be is inserted and the main verb changed to a gerund. In sign languages the sign for a verb such as eat may be articulated with a sweeping, repetitive movement to achieve the same effect.
The syntax of all humman languages is complex. It is not the aim of an introductory text to present the specific details of these complexities in this chapter.
Our aim is rathe to expose the complexity of syntactic knowledge that speakers of English or any language must have.
