Form, Meaning, and Focus in American Sign Language

Chapter 6 Agent Focus in ASL Texts

77 Chapter 6 Agent Focus in ASL Texts When multiple utterances are combined into a text, the level of focus on a given entity is determined by its semantic specificity and grammatical prominence at two levels: within each individual utterance and within the structure of the discourse unit when viewed as a whole. At the utterance level (see chapters 4 and 5), the specificity of the semantic content interacts with grammatical prominence to create a particular construal. At the discourse level, as this chapter explains, each utterance builds upon the conceptualization established by preceding utterances, increasing or reducing focus on entities previously established, as well as potentially introducing new entities. To get a sense of how this works, consider the text in example 1, which is one of the text elicitation prompts. The first sentence introduces the domain of scientific experimentation, which serves as the context for the following utterances. The second sentence focuses on the volunteers , explicitly naming them in subject position, fully specified and highly prominent. Noun phrases and pronouns referring to the volunteers (them, they, the others, the people) elaborate the trajector of each verb in the rest of the text, maintaining and reinforcing a construal in which the volunteers are the most salient entity. Simultaneously and conversely, the agent performing the experiments is never overtly mentioned. The use of passive constructions without by-phrases allows for the continued nonagent -focused construal throughout the text. 1. English Prompt Text: Scientific Experiment on REM Sleep Experiments show that REM sleep definitely can help you learn better. In one test, volunteers were taught a new skill. That night, some of them were awakened whenever they entered REM sleep. The others were awakened the same number of times, but only during non-REM sleep. The next day, the people who got their REM sleep tested better than the others at performing the new skill. When asked to translate this text (and the three other prompt texts), the participants produced translations with an analogous conceptual Rankin_Pgs 1-136.indd 77 10/18/2013 9:56:00 AM 78 : Chapter 6 structure, using utterances without overt subjects and leaving the identity of the agents unstated. This chapter describes their linguistic choices and considers how the level of agent focus in each clause affects the construal of agents in the text as a whole. Because the level of focus is affected by the relationship between prominence and specificity, the agent’s syntactic position and semantic content must both be determined. The approach used in analyzing whether and how agents are defocused in the elicited ASL texts incorporates both semantic and syntactic aspects, reflecting the depth of the symbolic relationship between form and meaning. The initial semantic approach involves determining how many agents are included in the text and the identity of each one. Once the agents have been identified, the texts are analyzed to determine whether each agent is overtly expressed. Agents that are never expressed overtly are not in focus in the text. Those that are defocused in a particular clause can be expressed as a focused entity either earlier or later in the narrative, thereby affecting the overall construal of that entity evoked by the text as a whole. In order to begin to study the ways that defocused agents are expressed and understood at the discourse level in ASL, ASL data were elicited through translations of English texts. This English-to-ASL text translation task was designed to provide an agent-defocused construal to see how ASL users would express it. The analysis of the resulting ASL narratives shows that they used both defocused and reduced focus agent forms in particular ways and at particular points in their narratives to evoke overall construals analogous to those in the English prompts. Each of the following four sections begins with a discussion of an English prompt text; once we have an understanding of the semantic agents in the English text and their encoding, we will be in a good position to make a parallel analysis of an elicited ASL translation, which allows direct comparisons of the linguistic strategies for defocusing agents in the two languages. That analysis proceeds in the same way as the English analysis: the semantic content of each text is considered, particularly with regard to the identity of the agents. This is followed by a discussion of the syntactic structures and phonological forms used when the agents are defocused. For each prompt text, one representative translation guides the discussion...