Universals in the Visual-Kinesthetic Modality: Politeness Marking Features in Japanese Sign Language (JSL)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:This work describes results of an experiment that teases out politeness marking features in JSL. The study uncovers a number of prosodic features relevant to marking politeness in JSL, and additionally, demonstrates that non-signers and signers share a visual-kinesthetic medium of communication that enables non-signers to occasionally interpret signs derived from assimilated gestures recognized either culturally in Japan or universally by users of different languages