Sociolinguistic Variation in American Sign Language

✍ Scribed by Ceil Lucas, Robert Bayley,, Clayton Valli

• Publisher: Gallaudet University Press
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 256
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The culmination of a seven-year project, this volume provides a complete description of American Sign Language (ASL) variation. For four decades, linguists have studied how people from varying regions and backgrounds have different ways of saying the same thing. Noted scholars Ceil Lucas, Robert Bayley, and Clayton Valli led a team of exceptional researchers in applying techniques for analyzing spoken language variation to ASL. Their observations at the phonological, lexical, morphological, and syntactic levels demonstrate that ASL variation correlates with many of the same driving social factors of spoken languages, including age, socioeconomic class, gender, ethnic background, region, and sexual orientation. Internal constraints that mandate variant choices for spoken languages have been compared to ASL as well, with intriguing results. Sociolinguistic Variation in American Sign Language stands alone as the new standard for students and scholars committed to this discipline.

✦ Table of Contents

Table of Contents
Editorial Advisory Board
Foreword
Introduction
Chapter 1. Sociolinguistic Variation and Sign Languages: A Framework for Research
Chapter 2. Collecting and Analyzing an ASL Corpus
Chapter 3. The Sociohistorical Context for ASL Variation
Chapter 4. Phonological Variation 1: Variation in Handshape
Chapter 5. Phonological Variation 2: Variation in Location
Chapter 6. Grammatical and Social Conditioning of Phonological Variation
Chapter 7. Syntactic Variation: Null Pronoun Variation in ASL Narratives
Chapter 8. Lexical Variation
Chapter 9. Sociolinguistic Variation in American Sign Language
Appendix A: Transcription Conventions
Appendix B: Sign Variants
References
Index