![]() ![]() She is co-author of two books with Tom Humphries of Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture (Harvard University Press, 1988), Inside Deaf Culture (Harvard University Press, 2005) and two sign language textbooks. Berman Endowed Professor of Communication at University of California, San Diego, and Dean of Social Sciences at UCSD. I argue that the differences in type demonstrate that iconicity is co-constitutive of the systems it appears in, and as such sheds additional light on the ways that iconicity and grammar are co-constitutive in the different sign languages of the world.ĬAROL PADDEN is Sanford I. Its iconicity is of a yet different type. Enga Sign is described as an example of “alternate sign languages” because they are used by speakers of a spoken language among each other and are found in in communities that practice speech taboos and avoidance of speech, notably in Central Australia. They too are iconic, but of the written characters themselves, not of their referents. Manual alphabetic systems, or fingerspelling, are found in many but not all sign languages, such as in ASL and sign languages of Europe and Asia. In this talk, I compare iconicity in sign languages to other visual-manual systems that have been described in the research literature. But knowing that sign languages are iconic does not explain how iconicity works in human languages. I hope this helps with understanding the scale of iconicity from transparent to opaque with regard to signs.The standard answer to this question is that sign languages are iconic because they can be, as visual-manual systems. It is difficult to see any clear underlying motivation for the gesture. On its surface the naive observer probably wouldn't guess at the meaning but once one is told the meaning, the motivation behind the original gesture can be understood more clearly (more transparently).Ī sign like "TO-PLAY" in my view would be opaque. In the execution of this sign the person face is being literally "pulled toward an object or a person". But for the general concepts this is how it works.Īnother sign that is translucent is for example ATTRACTED-TO/FASCINATED-WITH. So a sign may be "translucent" to one person and "transparent" to another. Signs will be more or less transparent, translucent or opaque to any particular person depending on how much they know about sign language and how it works in general. Of course iconicity from transparent -to- opaque is a scale. At that point you can see the underlying gesture the sign is representing but on the surface as the sign is performed today it has moved away from the iconic gesture. The motivational/gestural representation of "milking a cow" becomes more obvious after one learns the meaning of the sign. However, the sign MILK is more translucent that is, the motivated gesture of "milking a cow" is really lost in the execution of the sign today. It is based in the gesture of putting food in ones mouth and a naive observer would probably have no difficulty interpreting the meaning. For example "TO-EAT" is a very transparent sign. A translucent sign means that the sign has moved somewhat away from the obvious gesture that motivated the sign originally. ![]()
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