Mouthing and mouth gestures in Irish Sign Languge : a Cognitive Linguistic framework

Abstract

The aim of this study is three-fold. First, we present a categorisation of the types of mouth patterns that arise in Irish Sign Language (ISL). Second, we describe the connection between the forms of these mouth patterns and their meaning within the language, that is, the shared knowledge and context which creates and binds them and, third, we establish our findings within a Cognitive Linguistic framework. This framework illustrates how grammatical mouth patterns are embodied (Johnson, 1987), indicative of signers’ experience of being and acting in the world, that is, their experience as thinking beings. We examine how signers “flesh out” the meaning of language input (Fauconnier, 1997:38) to include mouth patterns as part of cognitive processing, based on the activation of mental spaces (ibid) and conceptual blending (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002).