Location in ASL

Recent work on location variation led us to investigate whether phonetic effects influence the lowering of certain forehead located signs in American Sign Language. We found that signing speed and the location of adjacent signs did affect these forehead signs in ways that conform to general principals of coarticulation. In this paper, we use those results as a basis to illustrate additional approaches to the evaluation of the phonetics of location. In particular, we suggest that finer grained analyses of location values may provide insights into directionality of coarticulatory effects, that changes in body posture assist in the achievement of location values, and that kinematic data can be used to describe the use of the signing space in a global sense. Previous work in sign phonetics has provided a solid foundation and new research is progressing well, but there is much work yet to be done.

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Cleavings

Invalid Modernism ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198832812.003.0008 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 167-180

Author(s):

Michael Davidson

Keyword(s):

Hearing Loss ◽

American Sign Language ◽

Queer Theory ◽

Sign Language ◽

Recent Work ◽

Emily Dickinson ◽

American Sign ◽

Critical Understanding ◽

General Thrust

Using poems by Emily Dickinson and recent work in cultural and queer theory, this final chapter explores the fine line between “gain” and “loss” in disability studies. Using the author’s own experience of gradual hearing loss, the chapter argues that recent claims for the positive values of “deaf gain” through the use of American Sign Language have vaunted possibilities of cultural inclusiveness to the exclusion of affective realms of frustration, loss, and failure that are seldom acknowledged experiences of deaf and hard-of-hearing persons. While endorsing the general thrust of Deaf Gain and its implications for the larger context of disability, the chapter argues for a more critical understanding of loss in the politics of gain.

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Modality and Mood in American Sign Language

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199591435.013.17 ◽

2015 ◽

Author(s):

Barbara Shaffer ◽

Terry Janzen

Keyword(s):

American Sign Language ◽

Sign Language ◽

Recent Work ◽

American Sign ◽

Modal Verbs ◽

Form And Function ◽

Signed Language ◽

Facial Gestures ◽

And Function

This chapter surveys the expression of modality and mood in American Sign Language (ASL), with a focus on modality and, specifically, modal verbs. Beyond sentence types, mood has not been explored extensively for ASL to date, although recent work on irrealis moods has been fruitful. For a signed language such as ASL, articulation with the hands is accompanied by distinctive facial gestures and body/head postures, which become increasingly important as epistemic readings of modals are obtained. Here we give a detailed discussion of modals in ASL that range from agent-oriented to epistemic, looking at both form and function, including some negative modals. We trace the grammaticalization of a number of modal categories and show how at least some of these categories have grammaticalized from earlier gestural sources. Regarding mood, we include some discussion of conditionals, hypotheticals, and counterfactuals.

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