2025/05/01 by Ryan Lepic · 1 voice
Mathematics · Psychology · Social Sciences · #American Sign Language #Cognition #Cognitive linguistics #Computer science #Hearing Impairment and Communication #Language, Metaphor, and Cognition #Linguistics #Mathematics #Philosophy #Psychology #Sign (mathematics) #Sign language #Swearing, Euphemism, Multilingualism
paper · pdf · doi:10.1515/cog-2023-0026
openalex publication_date 2025/05/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/22
Abstract Idioms are phrases like English [hit the sack], meaning ‘go to bed’. For linguists working with sign languages, a question arises: “What do idioms look like in a sign language?” This paper proposes a definition of idiom that can be used to identify idioms across languages. Idioms are affective constructions, they are phrasal units, and they are conventional expressions for members of a language community. This definition is used to identify idioms in ASL such as [keep.quiet hard] ‘just have to accept it’. This approach to idioms motivates a constructionist approach to ASL grammar in general, in which all aspects of linguistic knowledge can be represented as meaning-form pairs that vary in their complexity and schematicity.