The lingustics of sign languages

Sign Languages have not been the object of study of Linguistics until quite recently. That is why many aspects of each particular language are still unknown to us, specially in what regards their grammars. That is the central task we carry out at the LSC LAB: understanding in depth many of the properties of the grammar of Catalan Sign Language that are yet not described, or are described only partially and superficially, and even discovering new ones. It is like trying to understand an extremely complex mechanism from the parts that make it up, and knowing how these parts interact. To attain that end, we use the tools of formal linguistics, that allow us to analyze the workings of language. If we cannot understand the grammar of a language, we do not really know what it is actually like. Without grammar, there is no language.