Making Sense : : Language, Ethics, and Understanding in Deaf Nepal.

• Author: Green, E. Mara.
• Place / Publishing House: Berkeley : : University of California Press,, 2024.; ©2024.
• Year of Publication: 2024
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (242 pages)

"Making Sense explores the experiential, ethical, and intellectual stakes of living in, and thinking with, worlds wherein language cannot be taken for granted. In Nepal, many deaf signers use Nepali Sign Language (NSL), a young, conventional signed language. The majority of deaf Nepalis, however, use what NSL signers call natural sign. Natural sign involves conventional and improvisatory signs, many of which recruit semiotic relations immanent in the social and material world. These features make conversation in natural sign both possible and precarious. Sense-making in natural sign depends on signers' skillful use of resources and on addressees' willingness to engage. Natural sign reveals the labor of sense-making that in more conventional language is carried by shared grammar. Ultimately, this highly original book shows that emergent language is an ethical endeavor, challenging readers to consider what it means, and what it takes, to understand and to be understood"-- Provided by publisher.

Table of Contents

Note on English-language representation of non-English -- Preliminary definitions of key terms -- Introduction -- Deaf theory -- Taxonomic urges -- Semiotics -- Ethics -- Understanding -- Afterword -- Appendix 1 : deaf population in Maunabudhuk and Bodhe -- Appendix 2 : English-language signing and sign community taxonomies -- Appendix 3 : actions, orientations, consequences -- Appendix 4 : guide to transcripts -- Appendix 5 : transcripts.