Wit and Poetry in American Sign Language

One measure of the psychological reality of more abstract linguistic categories, for native users of a language, is the extent to which those categories are manipulated in such “secondary” uses of language as poetry and wit. The authors are particularly interested in how wit and poetic form in sign language are determined by thevisual-gestural mode. A dichotomy will be developed between those properties of the heightened use of sign language which are involved more essentially with the structure created by aspects of movement in general and those that are involved more purely with the grammatical code itself.’