Glossary (Version 8.4)

A way of communicating with the hands that uses largely unconventional forms (except for conventional gestures such as the thumbs up for good), and that represents more imagistic thought of a speaker or signer. In spoken languages, gestures co-occur with speech, and in signed languages they form gestural overlays.

A form of annotating signed languages, as they have no written form in the traditional sense. The gloss conventions used in the Auslan curriculum for sign notations are based on Johnson and Schembri (2007) and include the following elements: The English gloss of a sign written in upper-case letters (most commonly associated or nearest translation of the sign in English); lexical matching (where one sign uses a number of English words to gloss its meaning, they are joined together, eg look-back); fingerspelling (shown by s-p-a-c-i-n-g); the use of ‘g:’ to signal gesture; the abbreviation of personal pronouns (pro1, pro2) and possessives (poss1, poss2); referral to pointing signs as pt; depicting signs (ds[handshape label]: description of what is depicted); indication of reduplication by the symbol ‘+’; and the use of a bar above a sign to show NMFs.

The description of language as a system. In describing language, attention is paid to both structure (form) and meaning (function) at the level of the sign/word, the sentence and the text.