asl phonology

[Dan Parvaz]

> Does anyone have any suggestions?

There's the usual Model-o-rama, or "How many representational systems
can we take?":

* Diane Brentari's book (already mentioned)
* Linda Uyechi's dissertation on "The Geometry of Visual Phonology"
(published by CSLI)
* Rachel Channon's dissertation (still available online? Rachel?)
* My dissertation, due out somewhere around 2050. :-)

On another front, I'm having fun with discourse markers in ASL (e.g.:
what is the signed analog for something like pitch accent?) The two
chief contenders are Wendy Sandler's work (presented last I heard at
LabPhon 8) in which the non-dominant hand acts as an indicator in
ShaSI, and Diane Brentari and Laurinda Crossley's recent work on
discourse markers in ASL, where the corners of the mouth (? as I
recall) are the primary indicators. Also tantalizing is David
MacNeill's work on gestural "catchments" to show activity on the
discourse stack in English.

And yes, I fully expect the idea of doing something like ToBI markup
for signed languages to put many a budding linguist into therapy.

I'm sure there are others, but this is my list.

Cheers,

Dan.