Abstract
When people draw on the available modal resources (e.g. gestures) in specific contexts over time, those resources come to display regularities. The more a community uses and regulates those resources, the more fully and finely articulated their regularities and patterns become. Modes, organised by regular means of representation, are constantly transformed by users, depending on what the community needs. This paper discusses the way semiotic resources and practices, i.e. social actions with a history, used by sign language signers in visually oriented communities, as well as the research in such domains, have been marginalised. The paper reflects some of the main reasons for such marginalisation and argues how marginalisation is a result of some crucial misunderstandings in relation to (signed) languages, language learning, deafness, and disability. Research into human interaction, in general, has taken a multimodal turn. This paper suggests, through practical examples, how multimodally oriented research could enrich its view by recognising communication-practices inside visually oriented domains, as well as research in the area, instead of considering D/deaf and sign language related research as a specialised area of research.
About the author
Elina Tapio is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Jyväskylä, the Department of Languages, the Sign Language Centre. She is teaching curriculum courses and doing ethnographic research on signed interaction with a particular interest on space, multimodality, and multilingualism.
Acknowledgements
This paper builds on the findings of my PhD research A nexus analysis of English in the everyday life of FinSL signers – a multimodal view on interaction (Tapio 2013). The project was affiliated with both the University of Oulu, Faculty of Humanities as part of the Multimodal action and interaction in networked learning and work (MAILL) research project, and the University of Jyväskylä, Department of Languages, Sign Language Centre. Supports from various institutions are acknowledged in Tapio (2013). I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on the previous version of this article and the Multimodal Research Centre for providing an inspirational environment for writing.
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