Examples of this sort are referred to as role shift, direct quotation, direct speech, or constructed dialog.ĭepictions can contain a mixture of categorical and gradient forms. As such, he may also be raising the pitch of his voice and gesturing as Beth might gesture. Matt is not referring to himself when he says “I,” but is instead taking on the role of Beth, who is talking to a store clerk. She says ‘well, I’d like to buy an ant’ Clark and Gerrig (1990) Here we focus on how depiction is used by signers in situations designed to be difficult to describe. Users of sign language also make use of depiction ( Liddell, 2003 Streeck, 2008), innovating visual forms that map gradiently onto meaning ( Okrent, 2002 Emmorey and Herzig, 2003). The forms used in a depiction are often unconventional, and map onto meaning gradiently rather than categorically ( Shintel et al., 2006). The goal in depiction is to set up a physical scene that is analogous to the real-world scene, and to invite the listener to imagine the sensory or visual experience ( Clark and Gerrig, 1990 Clark, 2016). When depicting, speakers can vocally represent an object or event in an iconic and meaningful way ( Clark and Gerrig, 1990). Depiction is one of these communicative devices often used along with conventional linguistic forms. Speakers often combine different communicative devices-words, gestures, enactments-to produce multi-modal “composite utterances” ( Enfield, 2009). The second utterance may do a better job of evoking a sensory image of the event, allowing one to imagine just how bad the collision was. Instead of simply describing the event as in (1), the speaker in (2) combines two modes of representations-conventional signs and spontaneous depictions. In (1) the speaker describes the event using only conventional lexical items, and conveys the fact that the collision was violent with the word “crash.” In (2) the speaker describes the event with a less evocative lexical item (“hit”) but adds information about the severity of the collision with vocal onomatopoeia and the vowel elongated, BAAM, accompanied by an imagistic gesture depicting the crash. We discuss linguistic constraints on these gradient depictions, focusing on how handshape constrains the type of depictions that can be formed, and the function of depiction in everyday discourse.
Embellished DCs share a number of properties with embedded depictions, constructed action, and constructed dialog in signed and spoken languages. In addition, signers produced iconic mouth movements, which are temporally and semantically integrated with the signs they accompany and depict the size and shape of objects, more often with embellished DCs than with either lexical signs or conventional DCs. Embellished DCs were more frequent in the Depictive Elicitation context than in the Descriptive Elicitation context lexical signs showed the reverse pattern and conventional DCs were equally like in the two contexts. But embellished DCs also capture imagistic aspects of the objects, either by adding a tracing movement to gradiently depict the contours of the object, or by adding a second handshape to depict the configuration of the object. Both conventional and embellished DCs make use of categorical handshapes to identify objects. We found that signers used two types of depicting constructions (DCs), conventional DCs and embellished DCs. We asked signers to describe two objects that could easily be characterized using lexical signs (Descriptive Elicitation), and objects that were more difficult to distinguish using lexical signs, thus encouraging the signers to depict (Depictive Elicitation).
#Easy contour hand asl manual#
Here we apply this paradigm to signers to explore depiction in the manual modality, with a focus on depiction of the size and shape of objects. In previous work, we developed a paradigm to elicit depictions in speakers. When depicting, speakers take on the role of other people and quote their speech or imitate their actions. In everyday communication, not only do speakers describe, but they also depict.
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