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MANY PEOPLE WOULD AGREE that watching a skilled signer of American Sign Language (ASL) or any sign language narrate a story is a visual treat. The signer's hands and arms are busy articulating lexical items that are governed by the phonology of the language, and those items are sequenced in ways that adhere to the grammatical conventions of that language. Nonmanual signals such as the linguistic use of eyegaze, head tilt, and various mouth movements are also part of the vivid visual displays of body language the signer creates. Additionally, parts of the body, particularly from the waist upward, are also very involved in depicting various aspects of characters or animate entities from the narrative.
During descriptions of animate entities, the signer often provides a correspondence between parts of her own body and that which she is attempting to describe-the referent object. Correspondence between the signer and the referent is common in signed languages, and such correspondence can be seen in various communicative devices: fixed or "frozen" signs (i.e., those that do not tend to vary with the articulation of phonological parameters), more productive signs such as socalled classifiers, and uses of the upper body to depict characteristics and movements of an animate being. This article discusses various aspects of this correspondence, and data from ASL are used to illustrate points about this commonly used phenomenon in signed languages.
Correspondence between the Signer's Body and the Referent
Some signs depict correspondences between the signer's hands and arms and the referent-a characteristic of sign languages that has been called iconidty. Chuck Baird, a well-known Deaf artist in the United States, knows well that some signs are iconic, and one facet of iconicity is that the hands and arms can exist in a one-to-one relationship with the referent. Baird's work contains many examples of articulators creating shapes that mirror those of real-world objects and phenomena-examples of ASL signs. For instance, his 1978 work Sunset in Austin captures the image of a sun setting over the horizon by showing the sun with the ASL F handshape and the horizon with the horizontally oriented nondominant arm (figure 2 in the appendix).1 Further, his 1992 work, Fingershell, depicts a turtle beside two hands that are articulating the ASL sign TURTLE...