Movement and Rhythm in Nursery Rhymes in LSF
Temas
Detalles
The work presented in Klima and Bellugi (1976, 1979) appears to be the first linguistic study which pays attention to the poetic function in sign language (specifically, ASL). The authors present various aspects of poetic form in the visual-manual mode and pay particular attention to the way transitions between signs are manipulated to obtain a continuous flow of movement and how a rhythmic superstructure is constructed on the basis of the regularity in the duration of signs and on the presence of accents. Their work accords with the intuitions of signers, who mention fluidity when they are asked about what characterises a signed sequence as poetic. Now, if we take into account a specific poetic genre, rhymes addressed to children, we notice that most of them are constructed upon a strong rhythmic pattern. Since rhythm implies counting, we intend to show in this paper that the signing stream in poetic discourse can be perceived and segmented into discrete units composed of movements (and movement endpoints), that some of these movements are more salient than others and that the relative duration between points of prominence is both regular and contrastive.