Language from the Body
Subtitle: Iconicity and Metaphor in American Sign Language
Edition: 1st edition
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: February 26, 2001
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 256
ISBN-13: 9780521770620
Subjects: Sign languages, Braille & other linguistic communication; Social, group or collective psychology; Psychology; Language Arts / Linguistics / Literacy; Sign Language; General; Linguistics; Psychology & Psychiatry / General; Iconicity (Linguistics); American Sign Language; Metaphor
First sentence: Imagine that you are taking part in a conversation using American Sign Language (ASL), the language of the American Deaf community.
Description: "Signed languages are full of iconic linguistic items: words, inflections, and even syntactic constructions with structural similarities between their physical form and their referents' form. Iconic items can have concrete meanings and also abstract meanings through conceptual metaphors.

Language from the Body relates iconicity and metaphor in a cognitivist framework, shows how iconic and metaphorical items are central to normal language use, and demonstrates that these items can only be understood properly through a cognitivist or related approach in which meaning can influence form."--BOOK JACKET.