Language from the Body
Iconicity and Metaphor in American Sign Language

Language from the Body deals with iconicity and metaphor in American sign language.

Sarah F. Taub (Author)

9780521158602, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 2 September 2010

274 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.41 kg

"This book is liberating. It frees ASL from attempts to make it look as much as possible like spoken language and lets it be seen for the magnificent and poetic instrument of expression and communication that it is. In doing so, Taub changes the very idea of what a human language can be." George Lakoff, co-author of Philosophy in the Flesh and Metaphors We Live By

What is the role of meaning in linguistic theory? Generative linguists have severely limited the influence of meaning, claiming that language is not affected by other cognitive processes and that semantics does not influence linguistic form. Conversely, cognitivist and functionalist linguists believe that meaning pervades and motivates all levels of linguistic structure. This dispute can be resolved conclusively by evidence from signed languages. Signed languages are full of iconic linguistic items: words, inflections, and even syntactic constructions with structural similarities between their physical form and their referents' form. Iconic items can have concrete meanings and also abstract meanings through conceptual metaphors. Language from the Body rebuts the generativist linguistic theories which separate form and meaning and asserts that iconicity can only be described in a cognitivist framework where meaning can influence form.

1. A glimpse of the material
2. Motivation and linguistic theory
3. Iconicity defined and demonstrated
4. The analogue-building model of linguistic iconicity
5. Survey of iconicity in signed and spoken languages
6. Metaphor in American Sign Language: the double mapping
7. Many metaphors in a single sign
8. The vertical scale as source domain
9. Verb agreement paths in American Sign Language
10. Complex superposition of metaphors in an American Sign Language poem
11. The future of signed-language research
Appendices
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Social, group or collective psychology [JMH]