Metaphor in Creative Sign Language

The proposed research project will investigate the metaphorical operations that contribute to the artistic effects of creative language in British Sign Language. The project aims to produce a large-scale corpus of signed poems and stories to be used in the analysis. The main research question will be: What are the unique features of metaphors in creative sign language? How do they manifest themselves in the visual-manual-spatial modality? What do they inform us about how the mind perceives the world?The questions addressed in this project require multidisciplinary research methods (combining linguistic analysis of the collected data and textual analysis). The project will be conducted in conjunction with British Deaf poets.