Question mark question

Sun Mar 23 12:37:46 UTC 2014

I would agree with your assessment Valerie, that in ASL, the symbol of question mark is essentially a pause, and note from the grammar that it is coupled with a repeated word "you", "why," "who"  at the beginning and the end of a phrase, similar to me with Spanish where there is a question mark at the beginning and end of the phrase. The coupling of a pause with repeated marker is translated "interrogative" for the entire phrase. One could put an interrogative where the question mark is used (when ASL actually puts "ask" but that is misinterpreting "ask" as "question" where "ask" is a particular use of ASL phraseology. More often "question mark" is a combination of repetition, a pause, and a facial expression in the repeated chereme (eyebrows up). 

Charles Butler
chazzer3332000 at yahoo.com
240-764-5748
Clear writing moves business forward.

________________________________
 From: Valerie Sutton <signwriting at MAC.COM>
To: SW-L at LISTSERV.VALENCIACOLLEGE.EDU 
Sent: Saturday, March 22, 2014 2:45 PM
Subject: Re: Question mark question

SignWriting List
March 22, 2014

Hello Jonathan and Cherie!
I will be happy to answer your question about the Question Mark next message, but just to make it clear, the link and the description that Jonathan has pasted here is an excerpt from a Master’s Degree Thesis by Amy Rosenberg:

Writing Signed Languages
In Support of Adopting an ASL Writing System
http://www.signwriting.org/forums/research/rese010.html

by
Amy Rosenberg
Master's Thesis, University of Kansas
Department of Linguistics, 1999

On Mar 22, 2014, at 6:22 AM, Jonathan Duncan <duncanjonathan at yahoo.ca> wrote:

Hi all,
    I was wondering about question marks in Signwriting.

I found this 

http://www.signwriting.org/forums/research/rese025.html

Any word written in SignWriting has the face, or shoulder bar on top (if necessary) and the handshape(s) around the face or shoulder bar. General movements are below the handshape(s) , but finger movements are indicated by the fingers of the handshape(s) and head movements are indicated by the face symbol . A sign dictionary written in SignWriting looks up lexical items based on the ten groups of handshapes, then on the movements, also broken down into groups, then facial expressions, then head and body positions as demonstrated in Appendix G.

Two questionable SignWriting practices involve punctuation and the
      writing of fingerspelled words. Punctuation in SignWriting makes
      use of bars. One vertical, slightly thick bar placed after a sign
      indicates a period. Two thin vertical bars indicate a pause or
      comma , and two thin vertical bars slightly further apart indicate
      a longer pause or semi-colon . Two bars next to each other, one
      thin and the other thick indicate a question mark . Two thick bars
      indicate a colon . Parentheses and quotes look similar to the
      punctuation marks used in English. All of the punctuation marks
      used in SignWriting can be the same as those used to write
      English: . , ; ? : ( ).

There is no reason for SignWriting to adopt unique punctuation
      marks for American Sign Language and it does not take away from
      the writing of SignWriting to use English punctuation marks.
      Furthermore, when a signer fingerspells an English word in ASL,
      SignWriting uses the appropriate handshape symbol to write the
      letters in the English word. This is also possibly a convention
      that could be changed. Writing SignWriting by hand, one would
      probably write the fingerspelled word in English letters instead
      of writing the handshapes for each of the letters...*Footnote 15...
It describes a question mark as "Two bars next to each other, one
    thin and the other thick indicate a question mark" but that
    description fits the Semi-Colon.  And in the example above it there
    seems to the semi-colon symbol after the questions.
.

So is the symbol for the semi-colon the same as the question mark?

-- 

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         joyoduncan at gmail.com
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Valerie Sutton
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________________________________________________ 
SIGNWRITING LIST INFORMATION 
Valerie Sutton
SignWriting List moderator
sutton at signwriting.org 
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sw-l at listserv.valenciacollege.edu 
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________________________________________________

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Valerie Sutton
SignWriting List moderator
sutton at signwriting.org

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