8 - Notation systems

Summary

Introduction

Consider the following visual representations for the concept number 3”:

Photographs (Figure 8.1), drawings (Figure 8.2), videotapes and sound tapes are examples of recordings of linguistic data. Although they vary in their degree of data “fidelity” due to the fact that any recording necessarily makes a selection from all the data points present in an actual utterance and its context, these recordings stay close to the actual utterance. They can be collected, but the collection cannot be sorted into subsets nor can subsets be counted meaningfully because a recording is a non-analytic representation of the perceptible side or form of a linguistic utterance. For example, without a notation system, one cannot select all recordings that show all fingers extended in a corpus of American Sign Language (ASL) signs.

Figure 8.3 throughFigure 8.8 are notations of a linguistic utterance. Figure 8.3, Figure 8.4 and Figure 8.5 show writing systems, Figure 8.6 and Figure 8.7 transcription systems, and Figure 8.8 a coding system we are developing for signed languages. Notations, unlike recordings, intentionally abstract away from the original linguistic events in ways not dictated by limitations of the recording process or “artistic license,” but by (more or less) systematic decisions to annotate or symbolize only some (discrete) elements of the original signal. In almost all cases, they are part of an analytic system of some kind, but they differ from each other in what they represent, how they do it and their goals.