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Anthropomorphism in Sign Languages: A Look at Poetry and Storytelling with a Focus on British Sign Language

Rachel Sutton-Spence, +1 more
- 01 Jul 2010 - 
- Vol. 10, Iss: 4, pp 442-475
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TLDR
In this paper, the authors consider four main factors that allow signers to anthropomorphize the whole range of entities (from animate to inanimate): the linguistic base that allows such play, the ability of the nonmanuals to anthropomorphicize even when the manual articulators are signing in an ordinary way, the range of possibilities for both manual and non-manual articulators when the signer engages in (almost) complete embodiment of a nonhuman character, and how nonhumans are portrayed as communicating via sign language.
Abstract
The work presented here considers some linguistic methods used in sign anthropomorphism. We find a cline of signed anthropomorphism that depends on a number of factors, including the skills and intention of the signer, the animacy of the entities represented, the form of their bodies, and the form of vocabulary signs referring to those entities. We consider four main factors that allow signers to anthropomorphize the whole range of entities (from animate to inanimate): the linguistic base that allows such play, the ability of the nonmanuals to anthropomorphize even when the manual articulators are signing in an ordinary way, the range of possibilities for both manual and nonmanual articulators when the signer engages in (almost) complete embodiment of the nonhuman character, and how nonhumans are portrayed as communicating via sign language.

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Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI

Children’s understanding of Aesop’s fables: relations to reading comprehension and theory of mind

TL;DR: Findings point to the importance of developing mental state awareness in children’s ability to judge characters’ intentions and to understand the deeper message embedded in fables.
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Of the body and the hands: patterned iconicity for semantic categories*

TL;DR: It is argued that these iconic patterns are rooted in using the body for communication, and provide a basis for understanding how meaningful communication emerges quickly in gesture and persists in emergent and established sign languages.
Journal ArticleDOI

The Role of Sign Language Narratives in Developing Identity for Deaf Children

TL;DR: In this paper, the role of sign language narratives in the development of deaf identity in children is discussed, by analyzing interviews with British Deaf teachers and other Deaf adults as well as stories told to children using British Sign Language.
Journal ArticleDOI

Comparing the Products and the Processes of Creating Sign Language Poetry and Pantomimic Improvisations

TL;DR: In this article, the authors compare artistic mime and the more mimetic elements of sign language poetry, and find that many aspects of the art that we call mime can be seen in sign-language poetry, so that we may refer to sign language mime as non-mime.
Journal ArticleDOI

Tradução intermodal, intersemiótica e interlinguística de textos escritos em Português para a Libras oral

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present some types of translation involved in the translation from written Portuguese to Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) and discuss these different types and focus in the intermodal translation, that is specific of language pairs in which the modalities are different.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã

TL;DR: The Pirah language as mentioned in this paper is a language restricted to non-abstract subjects which fall within the immediate experience of interlocutors, which explains the absence of numbers of any kind or a concept of counting and of any terms for quantification.
Book

Language from the Body: Iconicity and Metaphor in American Sign Language

TL;DR: This work presents a model of iconicity in signed and spoken languages using the analogue-building model of linguistic iconicity and describes the superposition of metaphors in an American Sign Language poem as a source domain.
Book

The Linguistics of British Sign Language: An Introduction

TL;DR: Conventions used in the text 1. Linguistics and sign linguistics 2. BSL in its social context 3. Constructing sign sentences 4. Questions and negation 5. Mouth patterns and non-manual features in BSL.
Book

Toward a Theory of Cultural Linguistics

TL;DR: Palmer as mentioned in this paper restores imagery to a central place in studies of language and culture by bringing together the insights of cognitive linguistics and anthropology to form a new theory of cultural linguistics.
Book

The new anthropomorphism

TL;DR: This chapter discusses Anthropomorphism and teleology, explicit anthropomorphism, behaviourist taboo, uniqueness of Man, consciousness, unconsciousness, compulsive anthropomorphic thinking, and its applications to modern life.