Page 77 - Reading Between the Sign Intercultural Communication for Sign Language Interpreters

62 Reading Between the Signs

Another aspect of cultural rhetoric is the way we organize and
present our thoughts. It includes “where to begin, where to stop,
how to move from point to point, how many and which points to
stress…” (240). Hearing American children learn in elementary
school a basic form of organization: topic sentence, three clarify-
ing examples, and conclusion, and they are instructed to line up
their points in a logical progression.
Our style of communicating, however, is not by any means
universal. German communicative style, for instance, differs from
American style in several important ways. As described by Hall
and Hall, Americans prefer a “headline style”—short and to the
point; we often open a presentation by divulging what it will be
about (e.g., today I will discuss the three reasons why you should
vote for X). In contrast, according to Hall and Hall, “Just as the
verb often comes at the end of a German sentence, it takes a
while for Germans to get to the point.” Germans also place great
value on history and often commence a presentation with a dis-
cussion of the historical background of the subject at hand (49).
Chinese (as well as other Southeast Asian languages and ASL),
is a topic-comment language. This term refers to the grammatical
structure of its sentences. In contrast with English, which most
often uses a subject-predicate style, 50 percent of Chinese utter-
ances describe the topic first, which “sets the spatial, temporal or
personal framework for the following assertion” (Young 74). In
other words, the topic gives the background information and the
context needed to appreciate the new information or argument
contained in the comment. An example is the sentence “Blue surf
board, giant squid ate” cited by Linda Wai Ling Young in her essay
“Inscrutability Revisited,” where she discusses the implications of
this difference.
In her study, Young went beyond the sentence level and noted
how this same organizational framework applied to chunks of dis-
course expressed by native Chinese speakers when speaking En-
glish. She found that when the Chinese speakers were attempting
to persuade others, they would start with the background and then
make their main point at the end. The most striking finding in
this study, which carries deep implications for sign language in-
terpreters, is the strong negative reactions native English speak-
ers expressed upon hearing a tape of Chinese speakers utilizing
the topic-comment structure in English. Without the introductory
thesis statement common in English, “the main point was ini-

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