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The best survey of cognitive linguistics available, this Handbook provides a thorough explanation of its rich methodology, key results, and interdisciplinary context. With in-depth coverage of the research questions, basic concepts, and various theoretical approaches, the Handbook addresses newly emerging subfields and shows their contribution to the discipline. The Handbook introduces fields of study that have become central to cognitive linguistics, such as conceptual mappings and construction grammar. It explains all the main areas of linguistic analysis traditionally expected in a full linguistics framework, and includes fields of study such as language acquisition, sociolinguistics, diachronic studies, and corpus linguistics. Setting linguistic facts within the context of many other disciplines, the Handbook will be welcomed by researchers and students in a broad range of disciplines, including linguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience, gesture studies, computational linguistics, and multimodal studies.
Although a number of edited collections deal with either the languages of the world or the languages of particular regions or genetic families, only a few cover sign languages or even include a substantial amount of information on them. This handbook provides information on some 38 sign languages, including basic facts about each of the languages, structural aspects, history and culture of the Deaf communities, and history of research. This information will be of interest not just to general audiences, including those who are deaf, but also to linguists and students of linguistics. By providing information on sign languages in a manner accessible to a less specialist audience, this volume fills an important gap in the literature.
This book presents the first ever comprehensive overview of national laws recognising sign languages, the impacts they have and the advocacy campaigns which led to their creation. It comprises 18 studies from communities across Europe, the US, South America, Asia and New Zealand. They set sign language legislation within the national context of language policies in each country and show patterns of intersection between language ideologies, public policy and deaf communities’ discourses. The chapters are grounded in a collaborative writing approach between deaf and hearing scholars and activists involved in legislative campaigns. Each one describes a deaf community’s expectations and hopes for legal recognition and the type of sign language legislation achieved. The chapters also discuss the strategies used in achieving the passage of the legislation, as well as an account of barriers confronted and surmounted (or not) in the legislative process. The book will be of interest to language activists in the fields of sign language and other minority languages, policymakers and researchers in deaf studies, sign linguistics, sociolinguistics, human rights law and applied linguistics.
Sign Languages: Structures and Contexts provides a succinct summary of major findings in the linguistic study of natural sign languages. Focusing on American Sign Language (ASL), this book: offers a comprehensive introduction to the basic grammatical components of phonology, morphology, and syntax with examples and illustrations; demonstrates how sign languages are acquired by Deaf children with varying degrees of input during early development, including no input where children create a language of their own; discusses the contexts of sign languages, including how different varieties are formed and used, attitudes towards sign languages, and how language planning affects language use; is accompanied by e-resources, which host links to video clips. Offering an engaging and accessible introduction to sign languages, this book is essential reading for students studying this topic for the first time with little or no background in linguistics.
Understanding Signed Languages provides a broad and accessible introduction to the science of language, with evidence drawn from signed languages around the world. Readers will learn about language through a unique set of signed language studies that will surprise them with the diversity of ways human languages achieve the same functional goals of communication. Designed for students with no prior knowledge of signed languages or linguistics, this book features: A comprehensive introduction to the sub-fields of linguistics, including sociolinguistics, linguistic structure, language change, language acquisition, and bilingualism; Examples from more than 50 of the world’s signed languages and a brief “Language in Community” snapshot in each chapter highlighting one signed language and the researchers who are documenting it; Opportunities to reflect on how language ideologies have shaped scientific inquiry and contributed to linguistic bias; Review and discussion questions, useful websites, and pointers to additional readings and resources at the end of each chapter. Understanding Signed Languages provides instructors with a primary or secondary text to enliven the discourse in introductory classes in linguistics, interpreting, deaf education, disability studies, cognitive science, human diversity, and communication sciences and disorders. Students will develop an appreciation for the language-specific and universal characteristics of signed languages and the global communities in which they emerge.
"Dictionary of all know texts featuring illustrations of early American Sign Language and historical images of French Sign language and linking them with contemporary signs"--
Signed language users can draw on a range of articulators when expressing linguistic messages, including the hands, torso, eye gaze, and mouth. Sometimes these articulators work in tandem to produce one lexical item while in other instances they operate to convey different types of information simultaneously. Over the past fifteen years, there has been a growing interest in the issue of simultaneity in signed languages. However, this book is the first to offer a comprehensive treatment of this topic, presenting a collection of papers dealing with different aspects of simultaneity in a range of related and unrelated signed languages, in descriptive and cross-linguistic treatments which are set in different theoretical frameworks. This volume has relevance for those interested in sign linguistics, in teaching and learning signed languages, and is also highly recommended to anyone interested in the fundamental underpinnings of human language and the effects of signed versus spoken modality.
The book is a unique collection of research on sign languages that have emerged in rural communities with a high incidence of, often hereditary, deafness. These sign languages represent the latest addition to the comparative investigation of languages in the gestural modality, and the book is the first compilation of a substantial number of different "village sign languages".Written by leading experts in the field, the volume uniquely combines anthropological and linguistic insights, looking at both the social dynamics and the linguistic structures in these village communities. The book includes primary data from eleven different signing communities across the world, including results from Jamaica, India, Turkey, Thailand, and Bali. All known village sign languages are endangered, usually because of pressure from larger urban sign languages, and some have died out already. Ironically, it is often the success of the larger sign language communities in urban centres, their recognition and subsequent spread, which leads to the endangerment of these small minority sign languages. The book addresses this specific type of language endangerment, documentation strategies, and other ethical issues pertaining to these sign languages on the basis of first-hand experiences by Deaf fieldworkers.
Part Three, Psycholinguistics, offers the study, "Functional Consequences of Modality: Spatial Coding in Working Memory for Signs."".
Teaching and Learning Signed Languages examines current practices, contexts, and the research nexus in the teaching and learning of signed languages, offering a contemporary, international survey of innovations in this field.