Standardization Beyond Form: Ideologies, Institutions, and the Semiotics of Nepali Sign Language.

Nepal;Deaf;Sign Language;Standardization;Semiotics;Language Ideologies;Anthropology and Archaeology;Social Sciences;Anthropology

Hoffmann, Erika GeorgianaGelman, Susan A. ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Nepal;    Deaf;    Sign Language;    Standardization;    Semiotics;    Language Ideologies;    Anthropology and Archaeology;    Social Sciences;    Anthropology;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/58405/eghoffma_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Leaders of Nepal’s deaf institutions are currently working to standardize Nepali Sign Language (NSL). Through an examination of this process, this dissertation explores the relationship between the formal and ideological aspects of language standardization.First, I argue that standardization projects need not involve writing, though they must involve the objectification of some level of linguistic form. While lacking a written form does not preclude a standardization project it can affect its formal and ideological thrusts. In the case of NSL, the fact that its unwritten status focuses standardization efforts on the level of the lexicon has limited the project’s gate-keeping potential by permitting a wide range of signing practices to count as standard. This has allowed different deaf institutions to promote grammatically distinct forms of signing that reflect and promote distinct ideologies about the nature of the language, while still adhering to the same overarching standardization project. However, I demonstrate that teachers in the schools and associations cannot fully dictate the kinds of linguistic forms their students will be exposed to and produce. This introduces additional formal and ideological variation into these institutional contexts.Finally, having demonstrated that the formal and ideological elements of any language standardization project influence one another, I note that the nature of their relationships in any given case is not inherent or fixed.Therefore, the primary argument of this dissertation is that it is necessary to attend to the ways in which language standardization projects attempt to reduce variation not only in the formal properties of language but also in the semiotic means by which linguistic form and social meaning are linked.These claims are grounded in the production and analysis of detailed transcripts, making this dissertation one of the very few efforts within linguistic anthropology to carefully record and present the formal properties of natural signed communication. In addition, the arguments I offer about language standardization contribute to the discipline’s understanding of language ideologies more broadly by highlighting the multiplicity of linguistic forms, ideological perspectives, and the semiotic processes by which linkages between the two are created and reinforced.