| This dissertation examines a selection of mouth movements and postures. The mouth movements and postures chosen for this research fall under the general heading of mouth gestures (MGs). Some of the MGs under investigation here, as well as several others, have been classified as adverbs (Liddell 1980), adverbials (Baker-Shenk and Cokey 1980) or onomatopoeia (Bridges 2007). I will argue that the six MGs of American Sign Language: ' aa', 'oo', 'puff, 'bp', 'puu' and 'bt' are more accurately classified as ideophones. I support this argument by demonstrating that MGs share several hallmark features with spoken language ideophones, namely high iconicity, low levels of conventionalization, intractability of definition and high degree of context dependence. Data for this dissertation come from elicited narrative samples of Deaf native ASL signers who were engaged in a story retelling activity.;This dissertation challenges the prevailing argument that MG forms, like the ones studied here, are adverbs. Ideophones lie at the interface of the prototypical language forms which are arbitrary denotational symbolic units, and the prototypical gesture or paralinguistic forms which are iconically motivated context-dependent expressive units. Classifying these and other MG forms as ideophones broadens the paradigm and allows linguists, language teachers and language learners to deal with ranges of meaning, variance in forms and levels of conventionalization. |
