ASL Discourse Strategies: Chaining and Connecting-Explaining across Audiences

This study takes advantage of a novel methodology—the use of a single culturally-meaningful text written in English and presented to different audiences in ASL—to examine the ways in which Deaf native signers utilize contextualization strategies in order to match the perceived linguistic and informational needs of an audience. We demonstrate, through close examination of the ASL text in comparison with the English source text, that signers use contextualization techniques (Gumper, 1982), which are discourse strategies that support the construction of meaning. We suggest that two strategies for supporting communication in ASL could be labeled contextualization cues: chaining (Humphries and MacDougall 1999/2000) and what we refer to as connecting-explaining. Both contextualization strategies appear throughout all of the ASL texts, though connecting-explaining is much more prevalent; it appears, on average, once every ten seconds with most audiences. This study of contextualization contributes to our knowledge of ASL discourse strategies and has implications for various professionals, including educators of Deaf children, signedlanguage linguists, signed-language interpreters, and interpreting educators.