Idioms in Sign Languages

[Fischer Susan]

There are a few idioms in ASL, where I'm defining an idiom as an expression where the meaning is not derivable from the sum of its parts, but I don't know of anything formally written about them. A couple of examples:
TRAIN ZOOM (equivalent to "you missed the boat"; it's too late and I'm not going to repeat what I said)
PATIENT TOILET (I have to go to the bathroom)
ASL is not alone in having relatively few idioms; I remember someone saying that Greenlandic lacked them too.

Susan D. Fischer
Susan.Fischer at rit.edu

Visiting Scholar, NYU



On Mar 14, 2013, at 5:26 PM, Adam Schembri wrote:

> Myself and other linguists have made this point before - there is
> relatively little evidence of idioms in sign languages (i.e., of
> relatively invariant phrasal constructions with a non-componential
> meaning). Many signs that are called idioms by sign language teachers are
> not actually idioms but have idiomatic equivalents in the surrounding
> spoken language - hence the confusion.
> You can download an interesting paper by Trevor Johnston and Lindsay
> Ferarra "Lexicalization in signed_languages: when is an idiom not an
> idiom" from Trevor Johnston's www.academia.edu page.
> Thanks
> Adam
> -- 
> Assoc. Prof. Adam Schembri, PhD
> Linguistics program | Humanities and Social Sciences
> Interim director | Centre for Research on Language Diversity
> (http://www.latrobe.edu.au/crld)
> La Trobe University | Melbourne (Bundoora) | Victoria |  3086 |  Australia
> Tel : +61 3 9479 2887/6401 | Mob: +61 432 840 744
> Secretary, Sign Language Linguistics Society: http://www.slls.eu
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> University:  www.latrobe.edu.au/equality/ally
> <http://www.latrobe.edu.au/equality/ally>
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On 15/03/13 3:48 , "Rena Andrikopoulou" <rena_andrikopoulou28 at YAHOO.GR>
> wrote:
> 
>> Does anybody have any idea about Phd/ paper/ dissertation / research, in
>> Sign Languages' Idioms? Linguistic criteria of determination by simple
>> figurative/metaphorical language?
>> I am a Phd student of Deaf Studies Unit, University of Patras, Greece.
>> Thank you in advance...
>> 
> 

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