ANTH 120 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, English Verbs, Handshape
Anth. 120 Week Four Lecture Notes
Multi Modality, Sign Languages, and Gestures
● ASL credited to Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet as the creator in order to teach a deaf
neighbor how to read, went to Europe to learn sign language, learned the French version
and then created his own school to teach it thus why 60% of ASL can be traced to FSL.
○ Started in 1817 but not recognized as a language until 1960.
● A language which contains all the aspects of a language:
○ Phonemes in ASL: handshape, movement, palm orientation, location non-manual
cues all of which can vary between sign languages
○ Morphological aspect of ASL: Numbers incorporated into noun signs, noun verb
pairs, meaning conveyed through location, all of these especially differ somewhat
from English.
○ Sexism and location: Masculine signs are produced toward the top of the head,
femnine signs produces toward bottom of the face, which is not found in most
other sign languages
○ Syntax: In ASL mostly Object - subject -verb rather than subject - verb - object
like it is in English
■ Time always comes first in ASL syntax, time - topic - comment
● Gloss - the best english equivalent of a sign
○ One english word can have many different signs based on meaning such as the
word get
○ But one sign can also represent many english verbs
● Rochester has the largest deaf population per capita in the US
● Deaf vs. deaf
○ deaf - a person with severe to profound hearing loss
○ Deaf - a person with severe to profound hearing loss who subscribes to the
beliefs of the Deaf Community and Deaf Culture.
○ Common features of Deaf Culture:
■ Believe signing should be used in all situations
■ Greetings and leave-taking very drawn out
■ Oversharing
■ Success is a shared accomplishment
● Mulitmodality
○ We have semiotic modes or channels in language, semiotic means something
that represents something such as a sign representing a word or a word
representing an idea, a big part of how we convey meaning
○ Intertextuality: The interaction of now context or text less cultural items that can
only be understood through being familiar with the culture
■ Emblems: Gestures which are representational within a spoken language
and within that language are more or less universally recognized.
○ Double voiced discourse
■ Bakhtin’s idea that one can quote someone else when speaking, says this
creates a dialogic format within speech in that when doing this we convey
our stance on said quote or what said quote is conveying
○ Participation Framework, Erving Goffman
■ Goffman’s idea, he was one of the most important sociologists of the 20th
century, that simply thinking of hearers and speakers is too simplified
■ Hearers: There is more than one kind, ratified and unratified, one is
supposed to be hearing what’s happening and one isn’t
● Ratified: Addressee(s) and ratified over hearers (those who we
know are going to be ‘overhearing’ this such as those who watch a
tv show)
● Unratified: Bystanders, eavesdroppers (one is unintentional and
one is intentional)
■ Speakers: Also more than one kind, animator author and principal
● Animator: The one from whom the sound of speaking is emitting
● Author: The one who came up with the words are being spoken
● Principal: The one who is responsible for what those words mean
○ These can all be different people or all the same person
and various combinations thereof
● A ‘shift in footing’ refers to a shift between these during the telling
of what is being spoken, going from talking about something that
happened to you to quoting someone else for instance.
○ Conversation Analysis
■ Developed in part from Goffman’s work and part from Garfinkel
■ Focus on talk in interaction, looks incredibly closely at the words being
spoken usually through recording and transcription
■ Looking at language but also pitch, volume, rhythm, intonation, timing
which are all important for conveying meaning
■ Turn-taking with ‘no gaps, no overlaps’ when a group is speaking to one
another and as a result a gap or overlap is interpreted as meaningful
○ An adjacency pair is a unit of conversation that contains an exchange of one
turn each by two speakers. The turns are functionally related to each other in
such a fashion that the first turn requires a certain type or range of types of
second turn. A greeting–greeting pair. A question–answer pair.
○ Adjacency Pair: Invitation
■ A preferred response vs a dispreferred response both of which can have
several versions with various connotations
○ Adjacency Pair: Complaint
■ Can be responded to with several responses, an acknowledgement an
agreement/commiseration or a solution or even a dismissal/disagreement
or even another complaint
● Depending on each of these the initial complaint can serve several
purposes, as a request in the last response for instance
Document Summary
Started in 1817 but not recognized as a language until 1960. A language which contains all the aspects of a language: Phonemes in asl: handshape, movement, palm orientation, location non-manual cues all of which can vary between sign languages. Morphological aspect of asl: numbers incorporated into noun signs, noun verb pairs, meaning conveyed through location, all of these especially differ somewhat from english. Sexism and location: masculine signs are produced toward the top of the head, femnine signs produces toward bottom of the face, which is not found in most other sign languages. Syntax: in asl mostly object - subject -verb rather than subject - verb - object like it is in english. Time always comes first in asl syntax, time - topic - comment. Gloss - the best english equivalent of a sign. One english word can have many different signs based on meaning such as the word get. But one sign can also represent many english verbs.
