"Air quotes"?

[Scott Liddell]

My understanding of the sign (which I gloss as QUOTE) is that one of
its major uses is to identify non-standard or novel use of signs.  My
recent book illustrates two uses by native signers.  In one case the
signer marks an extended use of the sign LIVE to mean 'still in touch
with'.  In another example a native signer uses QUOTE to mark a novel
use of spatial depiction.
Scott Liddell

p.s.  In general I don't use "air" as part of ASL glosses:
AIR-CELEBRATE, AIR-THING, etc.    ;-)


On Wednesday, May 14, 2003, at 10:55  AM, Dan Parvaz wrote:

>> 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}