Extraordinary from the Ordinary : Personal Experience Narratives in American Sign Language / Kristin Jean Mulrooney.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mulrooney, Kristin J.

Series:

Sociolinguistics in deaf communities series ; Volume 15.

The sociolinguistics in deaf communities series, 1080-5494 ; v. 15

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Narration (Rhetoric).

American Sign Language--Composition and exercises.

American Sign Language.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (185 pages) : illustrations.

Place of Publication:

Washington, District of Columbia : Gallaudet University Press, 2009.

Language Note:

English

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 analyses12 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 events, 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.

Contents:

Narrative analysis

Theoretical background

Analyzing narratives

A prototypical narrative

The structure of introduction and background sections in ASL narratives - The structure of main-event sections in ASL narratives

The structure of explication, reflection, and conclusion sections in ASL narratives

Conclusion.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. 161-167) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781563684388

1563684381

OCLC:

794700884