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This volume elucidates several key factors of the signed languages used in select international Deaf communities. Kristin Mulrooney studies ASL users to delve into the reasons behind the perceived differences in how men and women fingerspell. Bruce Sofinski assesses the current state of transliteration from spoken English to manually coded English, disclosing that competent transliterators do not necessarily produce the desired word-for-sign exchange. In the third chapter, Paul Dudis comments upon a remarkable aspect of discourse in ASL-grounded blends. He discusses how signers map particular concepts onto their hands and bodies, which allows them to enrich their narrative strategies. By obs...
This handbook aims at a state-of-the-art overview of both earlier and recent research into older, newer and emerging non-standard varieties (dialects, regiolects, sociolects, ethnolects, substandard varieties), transplanted varieties and daughter languages (mixed languages, creoles) of Dutch. The discussion concerns the theoretical embedding, potential interdisciplinary connections and the methodology of the studies at issue, keeping in mind comparability and generalizability of the findings. It presents general concepts and approaches in the broad domain of Dutch variation linguistics and the main developments in different varieties of Dutch and their offspring abroad. The book counts 47 chapters, written by over 40 scholars from the Netherlands, Flanders, Germany, England, South Africa, Australia, the USA, and Jamaica.
Sign languages are non-written languages. Given that the use of digital media and video recordings in documenting sign languages started only some 30 years ago, the life stories of Deaf elderly signers born in the 1930s-1940s have – except for a few scattered fragments in film – not been documented and are therefore under serious threat of being lost. The chapters compiled in this volume document important aspects of past and present experiences of elderly Deaf signers across Europe, as well as in Israel and the United States. Issues addressed include (i) historical events and how they were experienced by Deaf people, (ii) issues of identity and independence, (iii) aspects of language ch...
Iconicity and naturalness remain controversial concepts in recent linguistic research. The present volume aims to scrutinize unresolved issues of iconicity and naturalness in language. The studies discuss topics such as naturalism in the philosophy of language and the epistemology of linguistics, linguistic iconicity in semiotics, iconic structures in Sign Languages, natural and unnatural sound patterns, the iconic nature of parts of speech, the relation between (un)markedness and naturalness, and lexical and syntactic iconicity. The research conducted is based on sound (meta)theoretical analyses and/or original empirical research. The data and innovative views presented are bound to spark discussion in an age-old debate that has lost nothing of its significance.
Signed language users can draw on a range of articulators when expressing linguistic messages, including the hands, torso, eye gaze, and mouth. Sometimes these articulators work in tandem to produce one lexical item while in other instances they operate to convey different types of information simultaneously. Over the past fifteen years, there has been a growing interest in the issue of simultaneity in signed languages. However, this book is the first to offer a comprehensive treatment of this topic, presenting a collection of papers dealing with different aspects of simultaneity in a range of related and unrelated signed languages, in descriptive and cross-linguistic treatments which are set in different theoretical frameworks. This volume has relevance for those interested in sign linguistics, in teaching and learning signed languages, and is also highly recommended to anyone interested in the fundamental underpinnings of human language and the effects of signed versus spoken modality.
This book focuses on how sign language ideologies influence, manifest in, and are challenged by communicative practices. Sign languages are minority languages using the visual-gestural and tactile modalities, whose affordances are very different from those of spoken languages using the auditory-oral modality.
In examining the phenomenon of quoting from multiple angles, The Pragmatics of Quoting Now and Then offers a fresh view on the forms, functions and usage of quoting as a meta-communicative act in various forms of old (printed) and new (electronically mediated) communication, setting it apart from (seemingly) related acts like repeating or referring. Recent interest in the formal (copy-paste quoting) and ethical (quoting as plagiarizing) aspects of quoting has been gaining considerable momentum in linguistics (and other disciplines), predominantly fuelled by enormous technological progress and the impact on both the procedure of quoting itself and its appraisal in public discourse. Embracing ...
While issues of marginalization and participation have engaged scholars across various disciplines and domains, and a range of theoretical perspectives and methodological framings have been deployed in this enterprise, the research presented in this volume aligns itself to alternative traditions by focusing on people’s membership and participation across settings and institutional contexts. The work here, thus, focuses on the constitution of marginalization inside, outside and across a range of settings. It centre-stages marginalization and participation as action in the human world. Going beyond a focus on the marginalized or explanations of marginalization or comparing groups of the marg...
The domain of evaluative morphology is vast and complex, as it requires the combination of morphological, semantic and pragmatic information to be understood. Nevertheless, cross-linguistic studies on spoken languages show that languages share some patterns in the way they encode evaluative features. It follows that investigating evaluative morphology in sign languages (SLs) can enrich the literature and offer new insights. This book provides descriptive and theoretical contributions by considering Italian Sign Language (LIS) as empirical ground of investigation. At the descriptive level, the analysis of corpus and elicited data improves the description of morphological processes in LIS, as ...
The aim of this volume is to bring together researchers interested in investigating the role that Discourse Markers play in language production and comprehension from an experimental or corpus-based perspective. In any kind of human communication, Discourse Markers are part of the game. This omnipresence informs us of a crucial inherent aspect of human language. Yet, as a linguistic category, Discourse Markers remain underdetermined. To gain deeper insight into this complex linguistic category, more systematic work is needed on the production and on the interpretation of Discourse Markers in a variety of situational settings, resorting to different methodological approaches. The contribution...