Depicting animacy in American Sign Language: Examining gestural and linguistic strategies
David Quinto-Pozos
(University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Perhaps one of the most obvious facets of signed languages to non-signers is the manner in which signers use their bodies in mimetic ways to describe the actions of characters while also producing lexical signs and grammatical structuresÑthe latter of which are likely not understandable to a non-signer. In other words, a speaker of American Sign Language (ASL) may commonly utilize her head and face, upper torso, and hands/arms to depict corresponding parts of animate objects and certain actions of those beings while also using various manual (e.g., of the hands) and non-manual (of the head, face, and torso) articulations that are language-specific. Users of spoken languages also take advantage of their manual and non-manual articulators for communication, although those devices are not normally considered to be part of the linguistic message, and they are not as common as in sign. Such gestures often accompany speech in the oral-auditory modality and are not solely responsible for communication.
The use of body parts for communicating the actions of an animate referent is referred to here as constructed action (following Metzger, 1995), although other terms have been used—in both signed language and co-speech gesture literatures—such as character-viewpoint gestures, demonstrations, and reported action. A noteworthy point about constructed action in sign is that some authors (e.g., Liddell & Metzger, 1998; Liddell, 2003) claim that this use of the body is gestural in nature, whereas other writers have described such meaningful articulations within ASL as linguistic devices at the lexical and the sentential levels of structure (e.g., Supalla, 1982, 1990, 2003; Lillo-Martin, 1995; Kegl, 1985, Padden, 1990). In support of a gestural account, some traditional properties of language (e.g., duality of patterning and discreteness) appear to be lacking in constructed action, although further analyses may reveal patterns that have remained unidentified and undocumented to the present time.
In this presentation, I will discuss data from several studies of constructed action in signed language. In particular, I will use examples of constructed action production, judgments of such productions, and investigations of constructed action across different ASL registers and different sign languages to provide a picture of how and why signers depict animacy by using this strategy. If time allows, data from a recent study comparing constructed action in sign to co-speech gestures by English speakers will also be discussed.
Results will focus on the obligatory nature of constructed action and the use of this communication strategy across different language registers and by speakers of different sign languages. The overall goal of these works is to investigate the complex ways in which constructed action patterns and interacts with sign language grammars and lexical items. However, comparison of constructed action in sign to co-speech gestures also provides unique insights into the constraints that govern its use in the signed modality. In short, by examining how constructed action serves similar and distinct roles in sign and speech we can come to a greater understanding about how language is shaped, at least in part, by the modality in which it is communicated.
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