| This dissertation examines how Deaf speakers signal meta-linguistic frames for different types of talk in lectures. The notion of "footing" (Goffman 1981) provides a tool in this study for examining changes in speakers' 'voice', or their shifts in alignment with their text and audience. Analysis focuses specifically on the formal characteristics of literary quotations and parenthetical asides, each of which constitutes a major footing shift for speakers in lectures. Drawn from a data-base of seven formal lectures in ASL, examples of quotations and asides are formally described, and discussed with reference to the meta-notative frames that the formal structures generate for utterances. The use of para-linguistic behaviors such as gaze, head and body movement, gestures, and prosodic facial expression are analyzed in terms of their interaction with the signed text to provide immediate contextual information about a speaker's utterances. Contrasts in gaze, head and body movement, gestures, and facial expression contribute to coherence in ASL lectures by creating temporal boundaries in the text (such as the preface before a quotation) and spatial boundaries in the discourse event (such as a change from group to individual addressee, to make an aside). These behaviors can also function prosodically, to index a speaker's affective and epistemic stance across stretches of discourse. The study shows that signals occurring in the para-linguistic code, comprise an important layer of contextual meaning in ASL discourse, suggesting parallels with meta-linguistic discourse signals in spoken languages. Findings in this study are relevant to the central problem in sign language interpretation of recognizing, and using appropriately, the formal cues which encode meta-notative aspects of a message in ASL. |
