Page 80 - Reading Between the Sign Intercultural Communication for Sign Language Interpreters

Selected Topics in Intercultural Communication 65

focus to aesthetics, design, and the evocation of the appropriate
feeling in the viewer. Print ads may consist of nothing more than
one word—the name of the product—over a provocatively sexy
photograph. One may see this ad plastered hundreds of times in
Metro stations, on billboards, and in magazines, until the effect of
so much aesthetic repetition triumphs. American ads, in contrast,
often resort to exaggerated claims to persuade the consumer that
their product is the best, the newest, or (in recent years) the low-
est in fat.
Communicative Style in ASL
Let us look at rhetorical style and persuasion from a Deaf cultural
viewpoint. What are some of the rhetorical forms of ASL? Besides
the topic-comment structure and beginning with the specific, an-
other common structure is the time-sequenced and detailed nar-
ration that describes in chronological order the events of the day,
week, and so forth, from the first to the last. A Deaf person arriv-
ing late for work, for example, would probably describe the rea-
sons for being tardy in an extremely detailed, step-by-step fash-
ion, beginning with getting up, what happened when she tried to
start the car, why the bus didn’t arrive on time, and so on—all
leading up to her late arrival. In a similar situation, a hearing per-
son would tend to give a shorter statement summarizing the cause
of the tardiness.
Shelley Lawrence, an instructor at Ohlone College in Califor-
nia, at an “Expansion Workshop” at an RID Region 5 conference
in San Jose in 1996, identified seven characteristics of native ASL
discourse, which she terms “expansion features”:
1. “contrasting feature”—used for emphasis, where the contrast-
ing information states what something is as well as what it
isn’t
2. “faceting” or descriptive elaboration—the use of several syn-
onyms placed sequentially in order to more specifically de-
fine the subject
3. “reiteration” of the same signs either side by side or at the
beginning and end of the utterance
4. “utilizing 3D space” in which objects or scenes are described
from more than one perspective
5. “explaining by examples” rather than by giving a definition
6. “couching” or “nesting”—to identify an object or phenom-
enon by description, analogy, or function, instead of by label

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