Is there a significance to word order in ASL?

Question

Going on the general assumption that ASL is loosely rooted in English (only in the sense that it was developed in a country dominated by native English speakers, this is not to say that ASL is derived from English), it most likely does not have a case system. If this is the case, based on my (admittedly shallow) knowledge of morphology and syntax it should have some semblance of a fixed word order, though not necessarily the SVO of English.

Is word order, as in sequence of signs, strictly rigid in ASL, or is there a bit more freedom in sentence structure?

Answer 1

Although I am not an ASL speaker (signer? user?), your question interested me. After some quick research, the simple answer to your question seems to be yes, word order matters in ASL. Strictly speaking, ASL sentences follow the a basic SVO sentence structure.

Languages typically have a trade off between strict word order and inflectional complexity (see slide 13). In a language with no morphological case markings and free word order it would be impossible tell what was the subject and what was the object. Therefore, languages with free word order require morphological case markings while languages with strict word orders tend to lose case markings over time since they are redundant (or perhaps it is more accurate the say that strict word orders develop to allow case markings to be omitted).

So far as I can tell, ASL does not have any case marking signs, thus word order must be respected. I'd actually be interested to know if there are any sign languages which do have such markings.

It is important to note that ASL sentences can contain a "topic" which occurs at the beginning of the sentence. Therefore, a signer may wish to emphasize the object of a sentence by moving it to the front of the sentence, marking it as the sentence's topic. English doesn't really have a concept of topic but other languages do. For example, Korean, which assigns case morphologically, uses the 은/는 marker to denote topic. If it helps, you can think of it as a combination of "Yoda speak" and wh-fronting.

It is also worth noting that some sources claim that ASL users are typically familiar enough with English word order that they can understand English-ordered ASL, I suspect this is because, in addition to the fact that not all hearing-impaired people are completely deaf and thus may have learned English, even ASL users need to learn written English. However, ASL grammar is not the same as English grammar. Some of the big differences are the ability to omit subjects and the lack of a "to be" verb in ASL. I found this paper that summarizes a lot of the differences between ASL and English

Finally, as jlawyer mentioned, sentences in ASL are not typically a linear set of independent signs. Signs may be combined to change their meanings as well as the spacial relationships between signs is important to meaning.

Answer 2

This is not an answer, but I'd like to correct a wrong assumption that you make at the beginning of your question :

Going on the general assumption that ASL is loosely rooted in English (only in the sense that it was developed in a country dominated by native English speakers, this is not to say that ASL is derived from English), it most likely does not have a case system.

However, ASL is rooted in FSL (French sign language) and is totally different from the British sign language ! To cite Wikipedia sign language page,

Sign languages generally do not have any linguistic relation to the spoken languages of the lands in which they arise. The correlation between sign and spoken languages is complex and varies depending on the country more than the spoken language. For example, the US, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand all have English as their dominant language, but American Sign Language (ASL), used in the US and most parts of Canada, is derived from French Sign Language whereas the other three countries sign dialects of British, Australian and New Zealand Sign Language. Similarly, the sign languages of Spain and Mexico are very different, despite Spanish being the national language in each country, and the sign language used in Bolivia is based on ASL rather than any sign language that is used in a Spanish-speaking country.[18] Variations also arise within a 'national' sign language which don't necessarily correspond to dialect differences in the national spoken language; rather, they can usually be correlated to the geographic location of residential schools for the deaf.

and (further down on the same page)

The grammars of sign languages do not usually resemble that of spoken languages used in the same geographical area; in fact, in terms of syntax, ASL shares more with spoken Japanese than it does with English.

According to your reasoning, Russian Sign Language, should have cases, since Russian has 6 cases. However, it is also case-less, as member of the FSL-family.

Which is to say that if ASL shares a characteristic of English (like e.g. lack of cases or word-order rigidity), it has a priori no reason to come from English.