"Air quotes"?

[Nassira Nicola]

First off, thanks for the multitude of speedy responses.  :c)

>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."

Yeah, that sounds like Gary.  ;c)


>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?


Sorry, I should probably clarify...  my data is from hearing ASL-English
bilinguals (not necessarily native, but definitely bilingual) who are
codeswitching, primarily between ASL and spoken English.  There are some
instances, however, of "spoken ASL"  (eg, saying "pah!" in a spoken English
sentence).

Incidental to the cross-modal codeswitching, a few of my informants used
QUOTE when they were reporting direct discourse (but only when they altered
their signing to fit the English of the discourse) or otherwise directly
transliterating from English (in an otherwise ASL context).

In my experience, though, the "extended meaning" sense *is* a lot more
common (just not, alas, in this particular data set).  It seems like the two
senses contain a similar implication - "This is not something one normally
says in ASL, but you know what I mean."

Anyway.

With gratitude to the list, I plunge back into the books.  :c)


Nassira

_________________________________________________________________
MSN Messenger : discutez en direct avec vos amis !
http://www.msn.fr/msger/default.asp