Drawn from the Ground: Sound, Sign and Inscription in Central Australian Sand Stories (Language Culture and Cognition, Series Number 13)

"Sand stories from Central Australia are a traditional form of Aboriginal women's verbal art that incorporates speech, song, sign, gesture and drawing. Small leaves and other objects may be used to represent story characters. This detailed study of Arandic sand stories takes a multimodal approach to the analysis of the stories and shows how the expressive elements used in the stories are orchestrated together. This richly illustrated volume is essential reading for anyone interested in language and communication. It adds to the growing recognition that language encompasses much more than speech alone, and shows how important it is to consider the different semiotic resources a culture brings to its communicative tasks as an integrated whole rather than in isolation"-- Provided by publisher Cover 1 Half-title page 3 Series page 4 Title page 5 Copyright page 6 Epigraph 7 Contents 9 Illustrations 11 Tables 17 Acknowledgements 18 1 Introduction 21 1.1 The Arandic language region 24 1.2 A multimodal approach to communication 26 1.3 Sign and gesture in sand stories 32 1.4 Tracks and traces: iconicity in sign, sand and gesture 36 1.5 Space and frames of reference 39 1.6 A multimodal perspective on gradient phenomena 48 1.7 Relationships between gesture and speech 50 1.8 Outline of the remainder of the book 52 2 Sand stories as social and cultural practice 55 2.1 Previous documentations of sand stories 55 2.2 Lexical semantics of the term tyepety 61 2.3 Dreamtime, Dreaming and the meanings of Altyerr 63 2.4 Sand story styles 64 2.5 Techniques and tools 73 2.6 Mapping, diagramming and games in Central Australia 79 2.7 Sand stories and awely ceremonies 84 2.8 The end of the story 86 2.9 Concluding comment 88 3 Catching a move as it flies: multimodal data collection and annotation 91 3.1 Recording naturalistic data in challenging conditions 92 3.2 Coding and transcription 94 3.3 The ‘sand quiz’: testing the meaning of V-units 108 3.4 Representing multimodal events as transcript 113 3.5 Concluding comment 118 4 Lines in the sand 120 4.1 Conventionalized ground-ground type V-units 121 Plates 131 4.2 Visible paths in sand 143 4.3 Combinations of static and dynamic elements 147 4.4 Motion and multimodality 149 4.5 The interpretation of motion in space 156 4.6 Innovation and change 159 4.7 Concluding comment 163 5 Body-anchored and airborne action 165 5.1 Previous work on Aboriginal sign languages and gesture in Australia 165 5.2 Handsigns in sand stories 173 5.3 Pointing in sand stories 180 5.4 A tunnel ball game in sand 185 5.5 Concluding comment 191 6 Ordering, redrawing and erasure 194 6.1 V-units and the order of narrative events 194 6.2 Erasing the story space 204 6.3 The role of deictic units in transitions between frames 219 7 Vocal style in sand stories 223 7.1 ‘Talking song’ and ‘singing story’ 224 7.2 Some features of Arandic songs 226 7.3 Doodlebugs and bogeymen: repeated text and borrowed words in a sand story 231 7.4 A ‘sung’ sand story 237 7.5 Concluding comment 247 8 Crossing boundaries 250 8.1 Multimodality, forms and functions in sand stories 251 8.2 Alternative representations in sand, sign and gesture 252 8.3 Convention or continuously varying forms? 255 8.4 Coordination across modalities 258 8.5 Verbal art, visual art 259 8.6 Inscriptive practices: beyond Central Australia 263 8.7 Concluding comment 268 Appendix 1 Abbreviations, glossing and orthographic conventions 272 Appendix 2 Summary of six stories annotated in detail 275 Bibliography 276 Index 293 Provides A Multimodal Analysis Of Women's Sand Stories From Central Australia, Showing How Speech, Sign, Gesture And Drawing Work Together.