Glossary

Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.

4 results found in sign language linguistics.

Classifiers (Sign Language) (Classifier Predicates, CL (Sign Language))
Productive handshape-based constructions in sign languages that represent a class of referents — a vehicle, a flat object, a person walking, a small round object — and show their location, movement, s…
Mouth Morphemes (Mouth Gestures, Mouthing (ASL), Adverbial Mouth Morphemes)
Non-manual mouth configurations in sign languages that carry grammatical or adverbial meaning independent of the words they accompany. In American Sign Language, mouth morphemes include patterns such …
Role Shifting (Referential Shift, Constructed Action)
A narrative device in American Sign Language (and many other sign languages) in which a signer takes on the persona, gaze, and body posture of a character in a story, dropping the default "narrator" f…
Topicalization (Topic-Comment Structure)
A grammatical construction common in American Sign Language and other sign languages in which the topic of a sentence is placed first and marked by non-manual signals — typically raised eyebrows, a he…