 Folks folks it seems that we have liftoff here. Can I get it? Get your attention, please? We're gonna go ahead and get started our technical problems have Been sort of resolved anyway. We need to go ahead and introduce Cindy Campbell our fourth in ASL lecture series And she was a foo. She's a former student. She graduated here a few years ago And she is teaching in the Department of Sign Language interpreter education here She's going to explain a little bit about her Her dissertation for her PhD and so I'd like to welcome Cindy Campbell. Hi everyone Thanks Barbara Ray for the introduction I'm thrilled to be here and also I'm thrilled to show you my work. I think this is very exciting Last year I was teaching a class at the University of Albany And I wondered what made me think about what I learned about ASL thus far so it made me it inspired me to Research more closely some poetry and eloquence And that's very rich. I found that ASL and poetry is very very rich So these are the results from the program from my research now It's not finished mind you the research will go on and lead to more research. This is a Semiotic analysis of ASL poetry sounds more complicated than it is I'm going to go on and explain a little bit more depth and you'll I'm sure you'll understand very clearly by the end of my presentation Okay, so let me start with some overheads for you Now the project that I'm speaking to you about Was an in-depth study of ASL in a linguistic matter as I've been teaching over the years I've taught many students and I'm finding that They're learning we're concentrating on sign use learning the signs for mother and father and soda pop And then when you get out in the world it the students found that it was very awkward still As I researched them and I analyzed them I couldn't figure out what was going on with them Why they were so awkward once they got out into the real world that led to my research because there was a question unanswered for me And I think that this will improve our pedagogy in Future years if we can answer a few questions It will also help students in socializing and being more eloquent with the language Thus far the research which is plentiful. We've been we've been focusing on ASL structure and narrative and discourse We have Named and labeled and analyzed all of it. We have structure. We know that ASL it has grammar and and Pet syntax we know all of that Still not quite satisfied. There needs to be more research and that's the intent of my analyzation here Okay, so secondly my master's thesis Was very critical that that answers that question that question that kept bothering me for five years It was very important for me to answer that question. So that was the reason for my master's thesis my master's thesis wanted to focus on how deaf speakers or deaf signers achieved eloquence in their narratives so a symbiotic Analysis is therefore attached to deaf eloquence eloquence of speakers So I went to a lot of deaf people that I knew deaf friends and colleagues and asked them To name for me a person that they remember in their Schooling or any time that they've met a person in their life that was Beautifully eloquent in the use of ASL They all named different people some teachers that they'd had some friends that they'd known Once I gotta gather all that information. I asked them. Why was that person eloquent? What made them eloquent? the answers that I got were That the signing was beautiful their use of the language was beautiful and and They were clear. They understood how to use the language in a beautiful way. This wasn't sufficient for me I needed to know more or more so I asked them to show me I answered them to show me why the person was so eloquent They couldn't answer me. I said that's the question. I need to answer and that's why I did my master's thesis on that Okay, I Already kind of explained to you that this will lead to teaching tools for us in the future now Want to focus on ASL discourse first? So I want to show you my studies and what I found in the structure of ASL and in poetry Now I don't know how much you've taken of sign language Some of you are more proficient than others and some of you are linguists indeed in the audience So now when we're speaking language What is a word? Like the word cake Okay, you have a tone of voice when you say cake. There's a sound cake There's the production of it, but if you pull that pull that word apart a little bit you can find the sound This sound that sound a another sound and other the end sound a cake Signs have the same thing we can pull apart the different signs and separate them into their phonemes morphines if you will Okay So example the sign mother, can you all see this mother? Okay? It has five what we'll call parameters Okay phonological components and here they are we have the handshape, okay? It's a five correct a five handshape Next we want to look at its location. Where is the sign produced right here under the mouth in the chin, correct? Thirdly we have a movement does the sign move there's a small movement with the sign mother Yes, you can do it you can move it a couple of times or you can move it once The fourth thing we look at is palm orientation Whether the palm is facing our reader or facing toward ourselves or facing to the right side or the left side, okay? And the last is the non-manual markers that go with mother The sign mother doesn't require any non-manual markers necessarily so This is how we split apart the word or if you will the sign mother All of these three four five things together make the sign mother. It's important now that the sign for mother Is moved just a little bit up to the forehead and there's one difference between the sign for mother and the sign for father and that is location Makes a different sign Okay, so that's critical That's in critical if one little Component is changed you get a different sign This might seem a little complex, but let me go ahead and I explain this to you Semiotics doesn't mean sign. It's not the word Sign sign means what like that is a sign So that's a sign knows that's a sign my mouth. That's a sign Everything is a sign every gesture is a sign. Okay. That's not what I mean Everything has the potential to be a sign so when we get a sign it has a process How we study signs purse in his work. He's a famous American philosopher back in the turn of the century about 1905 um His work Was focused on symbiotics He discussed Everything in the world the world of man people get a thought It didn't they interpret all of this information in their heads and come out and produce symbols and Everything in the world is connected to everything else Everything is interpreted as a sign or a word or a concept and it becomes Everything is connected. Okay. I have to show you his model So that we can put all this together This is purses model. Okay. Now. I want to show you here's one with a referent The referent I want to tell you what that means. Okay, my shoes my clothes. That's a referent my hair That's a referent. Okay anything one thing Anything that is one thing like hair or chair or whatever. That's a referent an object. Okay Suppose you see a person And you see their hair, how do we get the symbol h a i r We got to connect the symbol with the thing the object hair Okay, that becomes the interpretation into a sign symbol. Okay, that's the process Are we clear on that? Let me show you some more Podium, okay, I see this I see its shape. I see its color see what it looks like This thing how do I connect to that? How I connect to that is with language Okay, I need to make a symbol a word if you will for that podium Okay, now that thing represents podium Okay, the word podium represents the thing Now let's talk about language now. There are a million different signs, right now purse had three groups symbols That means linguistic words You have to have an agreed upon system of communication a language if you will an agreed upon system of words that represent objects, okay? So what's the sign for this what I'm wearing what's the sign for this okay dress good dress is the sign for this fine Now the deaf communities agrees we all agree if you will to sign dress for that for that object Now if I'm talking to a person from another country, and I signed your dress What we in America have agreed upon as the sign for dress they may not understand that it doesn't mean the same thing to them There people have a different sign for dress Okay So it's an abstract concept that we have to agree upon What labels we will use and what symbols we will use to define the object? Okay Now the next group from purse is Icons now icons are easy an icon means Something that makes a connection Now suppose I sign drink Okay, it's easy. You would understand that even if you didn't know sign language, right? Now if I go again to Europe or to another country and I sign drink It's very clear. It so clearly represents the action of that object that any other person on the planet would know what I was talking about The next group of components from purse is indexes Now let's put English aside here. Let's talk about ASL. Okay indexing. Do you see what I'm doing here? Indexing means referring back to something. Okay, say I'm I'm signing this about a car and I use this classifier for the represent the car the vehicle Okay That's referencing back ASL is makes high use of referencing If I say I've signed my mother and I put my mother in my left position here Or in my right position Then I can reference back to my mother on my left position or on my right position and you know who I'm talking about Suppose I have a big bowl of salad in front of me and I use the classifier But I can I maintain the size and shape of that bowl As I move this the bowl from the table to the sink. That's referencing back. Okay. I think you understand what I mean ASL is very rich in indexicality First I want to show you a little data. Okay, actually, let me show you a movie first real quick It's important that poetry there was one one little girl on here was so cute She's talking about a horse and a cow. It's just one minute. It's a very short story But it is beautiful Her use of language is just beautiful. I want to show you that first and then I want to analyze the data with you Simple little story, but beautifully done. Wow and a lot of analyzing potential there Okay, so before I show you the data now analyze that which is real important when you go to an English class You've all taken English classes, right? Writing classes. Okay When you write a paper How do you start what's your process? What's the first thing you do? Okay, you make an opening, right an introduction Opening statement opening paragraph. Yes, right. What's the second part of your paper a body good? Body that is however many paragraphs. What's the last part of your presentation? You're the last part of your paper a conclusion correct So the opening the body and the conclusion is in written language. Okay now ASL students When they produce Narrative they have the three same components. Okay I'm gonna go a little deeper into each of those with this date. I want to show you So I'm gonna let you know how we're gonna analyze this Can you all see? Okay, so when you start to analyze this I got this and I didn't know exactly how to analyze this data So I thought let me break it into columns. I'll have a one column a two column a three column I was a little bit awkward with this at first and I was talking to a teacher colleague of mine They suggested that I follow what the person does as far as their movement to their right side their middle or their left side Where the signs are placed and that made things all work out very well, so that worked Okay, you can see it up here. That's for the right side. Okay. Here's the middle. That's where the signs are produced So see what happens here in the middle space The little girl talked about the farm and talked about the cows And set the cows up And you could see the rooster then and the rooster was set up. Okay, all of that was basically in the middle frame Okay, in her middle space of her body Do you see all this down here later on in the poem or later on in the narrative? Do you see the Y handshape the Y handshape? And you see down here the The three classifier the three handshape and then in the middle we have two hands and the five classifier Okay, and then down at the end again So there's three specific handshapes that she used She used the three the Y and the five handshapes so the five is important five handshape is important because When you're shifting your body, I wondered why do people shift their bodies? Well, obviously, that's for a roll shift Okay for comparing in a contrasting Okay, this is what's happening when I shift to my left this character takes on the roll and does the speaking now when I shift to My right there's another character. I become another character and I do then the narrative for that character Okay, so this has a definite linguistic purpose role-taking role shifting Okay, so whoops, wait a minute. I've lost my technology There we go. Okay. Okay. It only slept. It only took a nap. Okay Now that role-shifting that body shifting that is indexing Okay, that's our left column We're all the where the Y happened and then our right column is where the three handshape had column Three handshape happened and then in the middle is where the five handshape happened Okay, so we have the cow on the left, which is right Our cow on the left, which is the Y handshape the rooster on the right Which is the three handshape and in the middle you had the five handshape, which was representing the farm So now So you have your three your five in your Y handshapes So who represents who's the three representing the rooster? Who does the Y represent the cow and what does the five handshape represent the farm? All those three are indexed over and over again And often at the same time the reason for that is because that makes a linguistic connection You can switch your body And you become that character At the same time that's an icon because there's movement involved You can see how the cow moves how the rooster walks How the cow choose its cud You can see the weight and the movement of each character that's index Indexing and it's also iconic iconic iconographic And that's called metonymy Okay, because you're combining two or three different parts That's metonymy Metonymy means two parts Acting in the same time You have indexing and you have iconic representation Simultaneously That's very abstract Very rich that story shows that The reason that a lot of hearing students who are learning sign language Are very awkward their first two or three years Because they don't understand the complexities of what they're doing We don't understand the complexities of what they're what the language can it can do I didn't understand that for quite a long time I understand I was just teaching them signs and I didn't understand why they were not getting the The eloquence and the complexities This research has led me to understand why that is They were not taught the indexing or the iconing Iconicity and indexing Okay, now let's look at the beginning the middle and the ending going back to how we write a paper right the Introduction the body and the conclusion. Okay, let's Let's connect that to our story Now you see all this that's happening up here in the middle section Using more signs farm cow Rooster Now do you see this later on in the story? What's happening? There aren't any words. There aren't any symbols Symbol use goes way down in the middle and end of the story and then at the end The words or the symbols crop up again So I was analyzing all people use this language and what happens is In the beginning of a story or a poem There's heavy symbol use then in as we reach the middle of the story or or poem Symbol use goes decreases and icon and indexing use Increases has structure embedded. It's it's it purely purely has structure. We know that When I started realizing kind of structure was involved And realizing how the structure was connected to the eloquence and the production It all started to make sense And this three column grid is what I came up with so the narrative structure is deeper than you think It's not just an opening introduction a body and a closing It has a lot more to it. There's more depth and more richness to it through the structure Than what we originally thought Now related to the data There's two tests in my thesis. Okay Analyzing the structure and also I wanted to test a narrative and how the structure applies to the narrative Okay, or if it applies, it's okay. I wanted to focus on Poetry because storytelling and narrative is very different than poetry I wanted to see if my thesis applied to it And it found that stories had followed the same principles as poetry but There's one difference The opening is strong symbol use the opening is is is very high in symbol use The the middle the body of the story is pretty similar to poetry There's a lot of acting a lot of gesturing A lot of role shifting and indexing Okay, a lot of you using the eyebrows up as in topic sentences. That's in heavy use with symbols And in the middle of the in the middle of the story icon and indexing increases in symbol use decreases And then you get a new topic in the middle And then you have your conclusion and symbol use again rises for the conclusion So I analyzed stories That's number I watched a lot of videotapes needless to say And did a lot of analyzation of the stories One thing I noticed one pattern that I noticed That didn't fit my thesis didn't fit my hypothesis And that was using the why hand shape why I wondered why And then I realized that there were many characters involved and the character there are five characters in the story So that's too much for a dialogue There's too many characters It's impossible to use this structure when there's more than just a couple of characters more than three characters It's impossible. That's why the structure needs to have a little bit We need to research the structure a little bit more the structural component a little bit more Now structure of course is critical that can help us Understand and analyze signs mental organization how we interpret internalize interpret and then Produce the language There's a lot of words when you write a paper, right? It's highly contextualized It still has its own structure Okay, the opening the middle the closing or the introduction the body the conclusion They all have its own structure. Okay in asl icons and indexes I wondered where they came from Comes from context it comes from the general world how we see things How we internalize and interpret our world And then it becomes iconic So it comes from the context So that tells me that hearing people and death people think differently ASL and deaf people are following a symbiotic process a symbiotic process That's why the structures are different Okay, now we come to the interesting part future research I think it's important that we do research in the future about researching hearing structure and deaf structure If you will they are not the same what ways they're similar what ways they're different I think we need to do a comparison Then I wonder when we do that comparison We need to find Ways that it will influence our teaching. We'll find new teaching tools We're not going to be just teaching vocabulary words to hearing students We're going to be teaching them more in depth about the structure the process And the semiotics I'm not sure how many questions are left But the research needs to continue that research is helping me to go ahead and develop some future teaching tools That will be more effective in the classroom Now here we are my conclusion The meaning of the study is the purpose of this study was for my graduate thesis I had so I had this burning question That I had no answer for carried it with me night and day Then I went into the research Found What else was involved in the eloquence of ASL the signs? Yes, but there was the The indexing the icon the iconographic components The structure was very rich very deep Think of the worldwide web Think excuse me interpreter error not a worldwide web think of the web a spider web Think of all the connections. It's not just one Strand many strands combined in a specific way It has a specific structure If you take one piece out It will fall apart. So the semiotic method is how one relates to the world how one you attach labels to objects Yes signs to objects, but there's more to it than that So we went through persis study his theory Now I've got all the data together. We've done some data analysis Come up with symbols icons indexes and how those three interact And form a very complex structure. It's more than just the introduction the body and the conclusion Much more than that Next The results as you've seen then the discussion The discussion leads to future research that I hope will hold many more answers So now there's some linguists in the audience or whatever It's your job perhaps to go on and do some more research And thank you very much I just wanted to ask her to Rewind the videotape and so you could see it where it had the y-hand shape the three hand shape And then the five hand shape in the middle and thank you all for coming today Now everyone who wants our id ce you sign up over where the fm units are and the next ASL lecture series will be on may 5th And it's going to be Berman He's going to be our last presenter on may 5th for the asl lecture series for this year Now if you have any ideas for the future asl lecture series Please submit any names or topics that you would like to have colored You can contact myself or susan fischer fischer or calling pool. Yo And Please submit those ideas and names. Okay So here we go once again the cow in the Whoops a cow in the rooster Do you have any questions for Cindy? We will be meeting in room for 15 30. We're just around the corner here. I'm sorry It's in room 15 30. Thank you. Thank you again, Cindy Let's hear it for Cindy Campbell. Thank you for coming today. Thank you