Showing and seeing: Enactment in British Sign Language conversations

by Gabrielle Hodge and Sannah Gulamani

How do signers use bodily enactments to visibly depict a referent while indexing other ‘invisible’ referents in the signing space around them? In this talk we present a corpus analysis of dyadic conversations between deaf BSL (British Sign Language) signers. We show how signers’ use of enactment is semiotically complex and rich with indexical potential.

Talk will be in BSL with ASL, English interpreting