Hi - Newbie here...

[Nancy Frishberg]

Congratulations, Keith, on finding the SLLING group.

In fact, linguistic aspects of ASL (and other sign languages) is much of
what this group discusses when it's active.  I suggest, however, that
querying a group of several hundred world-wide experts on what has been
their life's work for the past N years (where N may be as much as 25) for
essay material may not be the best strategy.

How about going to the library (and I know that UWisc Milwaukee has a
decent library of sign language materials), picking a book or two and
finding some topic of interest to explore?

Look at Klima & Bellugi's "Signs of Language" (from 1979) or Lucas and
Valli's more recent work on sociolinguistics, or any issue of the journal
Sign Language Studies.

While I might not have done it intentionally, my delay in responding to
your message gave you time to say you're supposed to write your essay out
of observation and conversation. So perhaps you and your instructor need to
be clear about what the goals of writing the essay are. Are you supposed to
muse about linguistics of ASL after having had some interaction with a
signer or signers?  Or are you supposed to have this interaction with
someone else?

Or here's a topic you might enjoy:  Think about the bandwidth issues for
eyes vs. ears or the degrees of freedom for the mouth as articulator vs.
the hands, arms (and face?) as articulators.

P.S. you may want to review your basic Spanish also:  Muchas (sic) gracias

>From: Keith Lehman <lehmankj at csd.uwm.edu>
>Subject:      Hi - Newbie here...
>To: SLLING-L at ADMIN.HUMBERC.ON.CA
>X-Rcpt-To: nancyf at fishbird.com
>
>      Hello.  My name is Keith Lehman.  I'm  a student at University of
>Wisconsin - Milwaukee, planning to graduate with a degree in Electrical
>Engineering.   As part of my requirements, I registered for a  linguistics
>course.  The instructor gave her blessing to write an essay about the
>linguistic  aspects of ASL.  Anybody care to discuss this topic?   Muchos
>Gracias.     ---  Keith
>

Nancy Frishberg  +1 650.654.1948  nancyf at fishbird.com