Search

This article discusses a new way of thinking about analyzing sign-language poetry. Rather than merely focusing on the product, the method involves observing the process of its creation. Recent years have witnessed increasing literary and linguistic analysis of sign-language poetry, with commentaries on texts and performances being set within and drawing on a range of disciplines and analytical techniques. However, attention has so far been paid to the texts and performances rather than to the process of their creation. While working with four of the UK's most prolific sign-language poets, exploring and trying to understand more about British Sign Language (BSL) poetry, we became increasingly interested in the creative processes that occur and emerge in the composition itself. We decided to give them a task related to creative anthropomorphism and asked them to think "out loud" about the process as they created their compositions. We took our lead from think-aloud protocols, which have been used extensively in studies of cognitive processes and knowledge acquisition to understand how we solve problems (van Someren, Barnard, and Sandberg 1994; Tirkkonen-Condit and Jaaskelainen 2000; Stone 2009). We invited the poets to reflect upon and share with each other how they tackle a particular challenging aspect that is often incorporated in sign-language poems. This shared thinking process enabled them to explore anthropomorphic concepts together and jointly to create poetic examples, while also giving us insight into the processes of task completion (rather than only its final product). (Contains 3 notes and 6 figures.)

The work presented here considers some linguistic methods used in sign anthropomorphism. We find a cline of signed anthropomorphism that depends on a number of factors, including the skills and intention of the signer, the animacy of the entities represented, the form of their bodies, and the form of vocabulary signs referring to those entities. We consider four main factors that allow signers to anthropomorphize the whole range of entities (from animate to inanimate): the linguistic base that allows such play, the ability of the nonmanuals to anthropomorphize even when the manual articulators are signing in an ordinary way, the range of possibilities for both manual and nonmanual articulators when the signer engages in (almost) complete embodiment of the nonhuman character, and how nonhumans are portrayed as communicating via sign language. (Contains 16 figures.)