Syntax: The analysis of sentence structure (pages 401-430)

Page 403 & table 5.2

Inflection: In English, for exaple, not all adjectives can take the comparative and superlative affixes, such as intelligenter, or beautifulest. Others cannot be pluralized, such as moisture, bravery, and knowledge.

How does ASL include Inflectional Affix. The example melt changed to melted, when signed.... CHOCOLATE MELT

Also, in ASL Time is at the beginning so that if I wanted to say that the chocolate had melted yesterday I would sign:

YESTERDAY, CHOCOLATE MELT

As we know, there is not a one-to-one relationship between the structure of ASL and English. This is why you see the past-tense inflection "-ed" in the verb in an English sentence like, "The chocolate melted yesterday," but not in its ASL translation of, YESTERDAY, CHOCOLATE MELT. The reason for this is that grammatical tense does not function in ASL like it does in English. In ASL, what one typically does is indicate the time that something happened, if it's important.

In other words, while in English we can indicate time ("yesterday") and tense ("-ed"), in ASL we tend to only rely on the indication of time.