Sign Linguistics

The building blocks of BSL.

In any language, we use words (or signs) to talk about “things”. These “things” can also be called “ referents”. Referents might be the meanings of, for example,

• Objects (e.g. a cake, a bicycle, a dog)
  
  
• People
  
  
• Places (e.g. London, France, Africa, the moon)
  
  
• Actions (e.g. running, painting, eating, writing)
  
  
• Feelings and emotions (e.g. happy, tired, thirsty)
  
  
• Relationships in space and time (e.g. before, after, in, on, under, next to)