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From:
Stefan Woehrmann Date: Sat Jul 1, 2000 9:40 am Subject: Re: native speakers | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Joe Martin answers on Saturday, July 01, 2000 7:29 AM Subject: native speakers > and to repeat what you already know, "native speakers" in the case of > signing, are the deaf children of signing parents. Isn't Irina one of > those? and isn't she 5? and can't she sign? You've got an > expert right there. Noam Chomsky would be asking her for judgements on > grammaticallity. > > In message 3689, you asked: > > "What is little Irina doing if she doesn't follow the rules? > Well, according to current linguistic theory, she is a native speaker, she > doesn't *follow the rules, she *makes the rules. I never saw it from this perspective. Thanks a lot for your answer. It supports my intuitiv attitude. I guess my problems result from the experience that a competent deaf adult jugded some of Irinas signed contributions as not appropriate. So when it comes down to write teaching materials in DGS I am insecure what kind of grammatical structure I should take as the basis - in this typical situation . You are right - Irina is a competent signer (in fact the only one in our group ) - but there might be a little problem because her family is from Kasachstan and I´m not informed about the influences ... It´s not the problem of single signs - she often informs us about different signs for colours, numbers ... but has no problems whatsoever to switch to "our" signs while she is talking with us. Sometimes she looks a little bit confused to watch different ways of signing of the same "concept" but has no problem to inform me that she wants us to use this or that "sign" in order to express what we agreed on. All the best Stefan | ||||||||||||||||||||
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