"Air quotes"?

[Dan Parvaz]

>I was curious (ok, baffled) - what is the preferred gloss for the ASL
>sign roughly corresponding to "air quotes"?

According to Gary Sanderson -- interestingly enough, of the National
Center on Deaf "ness" -- it's a symptom of interpreter laziness. His gloss
(more like an expansion) goes something like this "okay, what I just
signed/am going to sign is English, and I don't really have time to
process this, so here... you do it."

I'll be a bit more charitable. While the air-quotes certainly do get
abused that way by interpreters, I'll argue that they are similar to
typographical conventions for spoken languages, and _mutatis mutandis_
behave like italicization in printed English. I don't have any data on
their use by native signers, though. Does anyone?

____________
DAN PARVAZ
Computational Linguist, CSI, Inc.
PhD student, University of New Mexico
dparvaz@{mac.com,csi-inc.com,unm.edu}