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Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: American Sign Language, American Sign Language Grammar, Stokoe Notation, Deaf American, American Manual Alphabet, Profanity in American Sign Language, International Center on Deafness and the Arts, Asl Idioms, American Sign Language Literature. Excerpt: American Sign Language (ASL) is the main language of members of the Deaf community in the United States . One component of their language is the use of idioms . The validity of these idioms have often been questioned or confused with metaphorical language. It is important to first define the term idiom as, A speech form or an expression of a given language that is peculiar to itself grammatically or cannot be understood from the individual meanings of its elements, (Idiom, 2007). The following examples are written in ASL glossing . These idioms further validate ASL as a language unique and independent of English. Idioms in ASL bond people in the Deaf community because they are expressions that only members of the in-group can understand Examples TRAIN GO SORRY is one of the most widely-used idioms and is similar to the English idiom You missed the boat (Cohen, 1995). Another variation of this idiom is CIGARETTE-GONE (Vicars, 2005). COW-IT is roughly translated into I don't care for (Schmidt, 2007). I-I-I, the letter, not ME, signed repeatedly with alternating hands on the chest is an idiom that is translated into the English word egotistical (Duncan et al.). See also (online edition) References (URLs online) A hyperlinked version of this chapter is at American Sign Language American Sign Language (or ASL, Ameslan) is the dominant sign language of the Deaf Americans (which include the Deaf communities in the United States, in the English-speaking parts of Canada, and in some regions of Mexico ). Although the United ...

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