Studying sign distributions in American Sign Language online
Ryan Lepic, Gallaudet University
Language Sciences Colloquium Series
In American Sign Language (ASL), four signs are commonly cited as translation equivalents of English ‘what’ (Hill et al. 2019, 67). However, to date, there have been few studies of how these ‘what’-signs in ASL may differ in actual use. This project examines the constructional distribution of these ASL signs using video data openly available on the internet (Hou et al. 2020).
This presentation has three parts. I first describe the video database that our team has been annotating to study ‘what’-signs in ASL. Then I discuss how these signs are used in two ASL constructions of interest. The first is the “sandwich construction”, containing two ‘what’-signs, which has been previously emphasized in the literature (e.g., Petronio and Lillo-Martin 1997) but is relatively infrequent in our data. The second is the “question-answer construction” (e.g., Caponigro and Davidson 2011), which is quite frequently used with an identificational/focusing function. Our data suggest that the question-answer construction has been grammaticalized from a discourse-level rhetorical question construction, but that these sentence types can also be distinguished as separate constructions.
