In this Book
- Extraordinary from the Ordinary: Personal Experience Narratives in American Sign Language
- Book
- 2009
- Published by: Gallaudet University Press
- Series: Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communties Series
summary
Personal narratives are one way people code their experiences and convey them to others. Given that speakers can simultaneously express information and define a social situation, analyzing how and why people structure the telling of personal narratives can provide insight into the social dimensions of language use. In Extraordinary from the Ordinary: Personal Experience Narratives in American Sign Language, Kristin Jean Mulrooney shows that accounts by Deaf persons expressed in ASL possess the same characteristics and perform the same function as oral personal narratives.
Mulrooney analyzes 12 personal narratives by ASL signers to determine how they “tell” their stories. She examines the ASL form of textual narration to see how signers use lexical signs to grammatically encode information, and how they also convey perceived narration. In perceived narration, the presenter depicts a past occurrence in the immediate environment that allows the audience to partially witness and interpret the event. Mulrooney determined that ASL narratives reveal a patterned structure consisting of an introduction, a main events section for identifying and describing past occurrences, and a conclusion. They also can include background information, an explication section in which the presenter expands or clarifies an event, and a section that allows the presenter to explain his or her feelings about what happened. Liberally illustrated with photographs from videotaped narratives, Extraordinary from the Ordinary offers an engrossing, expansive view of personal narratives embodying the unique linguistic elements of ASL.
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Editorial Advisory Board
- p. vii
- Acknowledgments
- p. ix
- Chapter 1. Narrative Analysis
- pp. 1-21
- Chapter 2. Theoretical Background
- pp. 22-39
- Chapter 3. Analyzing Narratives
- pp. 40-52
- Chapter 4. A Prototypical Narrative
- pp. 53-69
- Chapter 8. Conclusion
- pp. 145-159
- References
- pp. 161-167
Additional Information
ISBN
9781563684388
Related ISBN(s)
9781563684166
MARC Record
OCLC
794700884
Pages
184
Launched on MUSE
2012-01-01
Language
English
Open Access
No