Bridging the Gap Between DeafBlind Minds: interactional and social foundations of intention-attribution in the Seattle DeafBlind community

Bridging the Gap Between DeafBlind Minds: interactional and social foundations of intention-attribution in the Seattle DeafBlind community

Blog Article

This article is concerned with social Inlet Valve Seal and interactional processes that simplify pragmatic acts of intention attribution.The empirical focus is a series of interactions among DeafBlind people in Seattle, Washington, where pointing signs are used to individuate objects of reference in the im-mediate environment.Most members of this community are born deaf and slowly become blind.They come to Seattle using Visual American Sign Language, which has emerged and developed in a field organized around visual modes of access.

However, as vision deteriorates, links be-tween deictic signs and the present, remembered, or imagined environment erode in idiosyncratic ways across the community of language-users, and it becomes increasingly difficult for partici-pants to converge on objects of reference.In the past, DeafBlind people have addressed this problem by relying on sighted interpreters.Under the influence of the recent pro-tactile movement, they APPLE SAUCE ORG have turned instead to one another to find new solutions to their referential prob-lems.Drawing on analyses of 120 hours of videorecorded interaction and language-use, detailed fieldnotes collected during twelve months of sustained anthropological fieldwork, and more than 15 years of involvement in this community in a range of capacities, I show how DeafBlind peo-ple are generating new and reciprocal modes of access to their environment, and how this pro-cess is aligning language with context in novel ways.

I propose two mechanisms that can account for this process: deictic integration and embedding in the social field.I argue that together, these interactional and social mechanisms yield a deictic system set to retrieve a restricted range of values from the extra-linguistic context, thereby attenuating the cognitive demands of intention-attribution and narrowing the gap between DeafBlind minds.