Marjorie Herbert will speak on "Mouthing, Fingerspelling, or Both?: Codeswitching and Lexical Borrowing in American Sign Language (ASL)"

Abstract
According to Poplack (1980), the most common outcomes of language contact found among the bilingual communities of the world are code-switching, code-mixing, and lexical borrowing, and the contact situation involving American Sign Language (ASL) and spoken English; however, it is complicated by the fact that the two languages in question are transmitted in different modalities. Thus, the question of the representation of spoken English, transmitted via the oral-aural modality, in the visuo-spatial modality of ASL, and vice versa, poses a problem for their linguistic analysis. The focus of this abstract is one of these outcomes, ‘fingerspelling’, in which signers represent English words by spelling them via the manual alphabet, in the congenitally d/Deaf community, and its implications for theories of lexical borrowing.