Journal of English Teaching through Movies and Media 2002;3(2):151-167.
Published online December 30, 2002.
The pragmatic factors of sign languages
Eun Suk Jang
수화에 나타난 화용론적 요소
장은숙
Abstract
This paper proposes the pragmatic factors of Sign Languages. Even though Sign Language grammar shares some similarities with spoken languages, its visual, spatial and gestural features combine to create some grammatical structures that are unparallelled in the world of spoken languages. In particular, the spatial qualities allow a signer to express two or more thoughts simultaneously. Signers use common types of nonmanual signals to accomplish the illocutionary force. Nonmanual signals for other types of structures require a different set of facial expressions and body movement. Signers draw attention to a particular place in the signing space in which a person or thing has been established and use a TOPIC/COMMENT structure to highlight key information in a sentence. Firstly, nouns are established in the signing space, and, after they are established, these nouns can be used to refer to someone or something. Secondly, certain verbs can move in different directions to tell us who did what to whom. Thirdly, the orientation of the hand(s) during signing tells us the subject and the object of a sentence. The direction of movement indicates the relationship between the source or the beginning location and the goal or ending location. The role of the controlled left hand and the controlling right hand, indicate the recipient and the actor of a situation structure. An argument can have more than one thematic role according to aktionsart (situation aspect).
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