Deaf Culture

Harvard FAS

This course will focus on the linguistic structure of American Sign Language (ASL) and other sign languages. Students will become familiar with both features shared cross-linguistically with spoken languages (e.g. complex verbal morphosyntax, abstract hierarchical structure in general) as well as features more notable in sign languages for modality specific properties (e.g. iconicity in depictive classifiers and anaphora, language creation/emergence), taking inspiration and empirical evidence…