but the threat they bring to artistic culture. From his opening mockery of the literary establishment’s tendency to theorize the world in terms of desire or gender to his disapproval of those who venerate art while denying its validity in the same breath, Jonathan Dollimore has created an easily understood, albeit at times too theoretical, synthesis of the literary and the experiential in Sex, Literature and Censorship. His arguments on critical theory do not necessarily reject the concept of theory; rather, he argues that critical theorists should strive to understand the contradictions within our lives and our literature and explore the daemonic power of the subjects that offend our sense of tradition.

Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication:

Preface vii Acknowledgments xi Chapter 1. What Is Language? 1 Chapter 2. Do Animals Have Language? 21 Chapter 3. In the Beginning Was the Gesture 41 Chapter 4. On Our Own Two Feet 66 Chapter 5. Becoming Human 82 Chapter 6. Signed Language 102 Chapter 7. It's All Talk 126 Chapter 8. Why Are We Lopsided? 159 Chapter 9. From Hand to Mouth 184 Chapter 10. Synopsis 213 References 221 Index 247

Gestural Gab@@@From Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language

Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood

This paper presents a critical examination of key concepts in the study of (signed and spoken) language and multimodality. It shows how shifts in conceptual understandings of language use, moving from bilingualism to multilingualism and (trans)languaging, have resulted in the revitalisation of the concept of language repertoires. We discuss key assumptions and analytical developments that have shaped the sociolinguistic study of signed and spoken language multilingualism as separate from different strands of multimodality studies. In most multimodality studies, researchers focus on participants using one named spoken language within broader embodied human action. Thus while attending to multimodal communication, they do not attend to multilingual communication. In translanguaging studies the opposite has happened: scholars have attended to multilingual communication without really paying attention to multimodality and simultaneity, and hierarchies within the simultaneous combination of resources. The (socio)linguistics of sign language has paid attention to multimodality but only very recently have started to focus on multilingual contexts where multiple sign and/or multiple spoken languages are used. There is currently little transaction between these areas of research. We argue that the lens of semiotic repertoires enables synergies to be identified and provides a holistic focus on action that is both multilingual and multimodal.

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Beyond languages, beyond modalities: transforming the study of semiotic repertoires

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Understanding Deaf Culture

When people draw on the available modal resources (e.g. gestures) in specific contexts over time, those resources come to display regularities. The more a community uses and regulates those resources, the more fully and finely articulated their regularities and patterns become. Modes, organised by regular means of representation, are constantly transformed by users, depending on what the community needs. This paper discusses the way semiotic resources and practices, i.e. social actions with a history, used by sign language signers in visually oriented communities, as well as the research in such domains, have been marginalised. The paper reflects some of the main reasons for such marginalisation and argues how marginalisation is a result of some crucial misunderstandings in relation to (signed) languages, language learning, deafness, and disability. Research into human interaction, in general, has taken a multimodal turn. This paper suggests, through practical examples, how multimodally oriented research could enrich its view by recognising communication-practices inside visually oriented domains, as well as research in the area, instead of considering D/deaf and sign language related research as a specialised area of research.

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The Marginalisation of Finely Tuned Semiotic Practices and Misunderstandings in Relation to (Signed) Languages and Deafness

This paper attends to languaging in the context of visually oriented communities of sign language users through the concept of chaining. I define chaining as the patterned, routine ways of interlin...

The Patterned Ways of Interlinking Linguistic and Multimodal Elements in Visually Oriented Communities.

The study focused on university students of English and their teachers appropriating an ecological perspective into language learning and teaching during a university course. The course involved designing and putting into practice an online language project for school children in Finland and Spain. The task was expected to pose challenges as the university students had no experience of the pedagogic approach applied. Two video-recorded wrap-up discussions and the students’ final reports were selected from the data resource for closer analysis. The qualitative analysis showed how the new/ecological approach was resemiotised through multimodal (inter)actions between the participants. Experiences of complexity were collaboratively negotiated through the metaphor of ‘chaos’, first as problematic, then normalised and even a desired part of language teaching. The study bears implications for language teacher education shedding light on changing understandings for pedagogical thinking.

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Appropriating a new language learning approach: Processes of resemiotisation

In the last 100 years attitudes towards deaf people and sign languages have changed drastically. During this time the deaf gradually became more visible in society: from the mid-eighteenth century an interest in sign languages began to develop, and in the middle of the nineteenth century education for the deaf began. In these early days deaf education could be described as bilingual, sign language being the medium of instruction. For the deaf this meant the emergence of a strong national and international network for the Deaf1 community. Deaf culture flourished until the time of oralism, which began in the late nineteenth century and lasted to the 1970s. Oralism is an educational system based on the view that the teaching of speech enables deaf people to become normal, thus reflecting the medical view on deafness which sees it as a condition to be cured. Signing was excluded from education because it was considered a form of gesturing that would hinder children from learning speech, thus — it was believed — preventing them from gaining a full human status.

Elina Tapio

Papers

Beyond languages, beyond modalities: transforming the study of semiotic repertoires

The Marginalisation of Finely Tuned Semiotic Practices and Misunderstandings in Relation to (Signed) Languages and Deafness

The Patterned Ways of Interlinking Linguistic and Multimodal Elements in Visually Oriented Communities.

Appropriating a new language learning approach: Processes of resemiotisation

When One of Your Languages is not Recognized as a Language at all