Adverbial Morphemes in Tactile ASL - Gallaudet University

PDE – Steven D. Collins
Appendix B – Notes on Transcription symbols
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A single slash (/) marks a short pause. These tend to be phrase boundaries or topic
changes. A longer pause, possibly a sentence boundary is marked by a double slash
(//). A long pause, possibly a sentence boundary or the end of a turn is marked by a
triple slash (///).
Signs in brackets are signed on the weak hand as in: [WELL]. WELL is the gloss
used for the Wh-sign often glossed as WHAT. I chose this gloss to show the
difference between WHAT, with the index finger brushed across the palm and the
gesture-like sign with the palms up.
Signs with a ^ between them appear to be compounded as in: LOOK^LIKE.
The first person singular pronoun I or ME is shown as: PRO-1.
Some signs include the index finger pointing to the right or left. This is shown as:
IX-lf. This may be a pronoun, a determiner, or a location in space. For the purpose
of this study, I have chosen to collapse these items under one gloss.
Some signs have traditionally been glossed as FINISH but actually have distinct
forms and meaning as in: FINISH (that’s all) [osc]. This sign had the meaning
“that’s all” and has an oscillating movement.
The use of …[overlap] is used to show that a signer has been overlapped in
conversation and the corresponding overlap of the other person appears in the next
line. Where “…” appears at the beginning of a line means that the signer continued
without any more overlap.
Classifiers are notoriously difficult to document briefly in print as in the following
example: CL:Y “pick up the handset from the cradle and set it down”. For this
transcription, I have indicated classifiers with the abbreviation CL: followed by a
short notation for handshape, Y, in this case, and finally, a short description of it’s
meaning in quotes such as “pick up the handset from the cradle and set it down”.
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