This section is largely based on information in the Auslan Dictionary [Joh89], but some of the material is also from several other sources ([Aus95,Uni89]).
As stated previously, Auslan is the sign language used by the Australian Deaf and non-vocal communities under normal circumstances and without outside intervention.
Auslan is related to British Sign Language, although not identical to it. It is dissimilar to American Sign Language, although some signs have been taken from American Sign Language and incorporated into Auslan.
Sign languages, such as Auslan, in general have very different
grammars to those of spoken languages. This is to be expected, since
typically it takes twice as long to make a sign as to say a word,
while it takes the same amount of time to make a sentence in Auslan as
in English (typically) -- the obvious and empirically correct
conclusion being that Auslan uses about half the number of words that
a sentence in English uses
. Sign languages in general thus tend
to be far more concise than spoken languages.
Word order, for example is usually not important, and there is
usually no form of words like ``to be''. Similarly, usually tense
information is indicated adverbially, rather than as part of the sign
itself -- for example, rather than ``earned'' the sign would be
``before earn''.
Auslan also has about 4000 signs in it. However, there are many ways these signs can be modified to alter the meaning slightly, and even more powerfully, signs can be combined to give new signs. Furthermore, there is the idea of a ``classifier'' -- a symbol which describes the physical attributes of something, by miming them. At any point in time, an English word for which there is no exact Auslan equivalent can be finger-spelled (in fact a number of signs are evolutions of finger-spelling, such as the days of the week). All of these serve to enrich Auslan to an extent equivalent to or greater than that of spoken languages.
Finger-spelling in Auslan is accomplished through using a two-handed
alphabet, taken from British Sign Language (BSL). Most other sign
languages (such as American Sign Language (ASL) and Irish Sign
Language) have one-handed alphabets. Finger-spelling is not only used
in Auslan when there is no sign that covers the meaning of
a word, but also for things with proper names, or sometimes even by people who cannot
sign Auslan but still need to communicate.
In the following section, we will focus on individual signs and their structures, since that will also be the focus of the thesis.