Lanes, role playing, voices and strategies

[Charles Butler]

I believe that in terms of writing, Dance Writing has just these sorts of conventions to sort out multiple dancers in a choreography, so your discussion has merit Louis-Felix.

Charles


Louis-F }_ ix Bergeron <hf091587 at ER.UQAM.CA> wrote:
The discussion on lanes makes me think that, in general, spoken
languages and their written counterpart do not use the same strategies
in the way they express meaning. The same can be said between sign
languages and spoken languages. Spoken languages are more descriptive in
their utterance construction, sign languages are more illustrative and
representative. Sign language utterances "enact" what they mean, spoken
language utterances "talk about" what they mean. In written language,
the utterances are even more descriptive than they are in spoken
language. The voice tones in spoken language can support parts of
meaning so that less words need to be said. But written utterances don't
have that kind of tones and need to express meaning mostly with words.
This is more obvious with dialogues. In spoken language, I can give a
different "voice" to each people involved in a dialogue, so that I can
easily identify who is saying what is told without repeating the name of
each participant to the dialogue. Sign languages use also a "role
playing" structure for this purpose (role playing is used even more
extensively in sign languages for grammar purposes, but this feature is
not used at the same scale in spoken languages). But written utterance
can't have different "voices", "role playing", or "hands" and fonts for
that purpose. So written languages use different strategies (like "Why
elephants are so scared by mice, asks John.") that could be heavy to
handle in spoken and sign languages, but are working well in written
language.

So I think that the written representation of a sign language does not
have to use exactly the same strategies than what can be done in a
signed utterance. Signed utterances can use space with fine distinction
because it can be easily perceived by eye. Also, sign language use three
dimensions. Written language use only two dimensions and the perception
of written utterances may not be as fine then perception of signed
utterances, especially when written form is smaller than signed form. So
written sign language may need to use different strategies than sign
language. For example, if we can't have fine and numerous written lanes
for the "infinite" little spaces that can be used in sign languages, why
not use graphic space markers? For example, if I have two persons on the
right that I need to separate and one person on the left, I could use an
empty triangle (the marker form doesn't matter for the moment, let's
just discuss the marker idea) to mark the first person and a full
triangle for the second. If I have a utterance that means "the first
person on the right calls the person on the left", I could write the
utterance with two locations, one on the right marked with and empty
triangle and one on the left unmarked (this location could be marked
later if I place something or someone else on the left). I know that
these markers don't exist in sign languages. But since the language
modalities (signed or written) don't have the same possibilities and the
same limits, they can have their own strategies, even if these
strategies are not in both modalities.

Louis-Felix
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