The Syntax of American Sign Language: Functional Categories and Hierarchical Structure (Language, Speech, and Communication)

Recent research on the syntax of signed languages has revealed that, apart from some modality-specific differences, signed languages are organized according to the same underlying principles as spoken languages. This book addresses the organization and distribution of functional categories in American Sign Language (ASL), focusing on tense, agreement, and wh-constructions. Signed languages provide illuminating evidence about functional projections of a kind unavailable in the study of spoken languages. Along with manual signing, crucial information is expressed by specific movements of the face and upper body. The authors argue that such nonmanual markings are often direct expressions of abstract syntactic features. The distribution and intensity of these markings provide information about the location of functional heads and the boundaries of functional projections. The authors show how evidence from ASL is useful for evaluating a number of recent theoretical proposals on, among other things, the status of syntactic agreement projections and constraints on phrase structure and the directionality of movement.

Reference

Robert G. Lee

Carol Jan Neidle

Judy Kegl

Dawn MacLaughlin

Benjamin Bahan

Foreign Language Study & Reference

Bradford Books

Recent research on the syntax of signed languages has revealed that, apart from some modality-specific differences, signed languages are organized according to the same underlying principles as spoken languages. This book addresses the organization and distribution of functional categories in American Sign Language (ASL), focusing on tense, agreement, and wh-constructions.Signed languages provide illuminating evidence about functional projections of a kind unavailable in the study of spoken languages. Along with manual signing, crucial information is expressed by specific movements of the face and upper body. The authors argue that such nonmanual markings are often direct expressions of abstract syntactic features. The distribution and intensity of these markings provide information about the location of functional heads and the boundaries of functional projections. The authors show how evidence from ASL is useful for evaluating a number of recent theoretical proposals on, among other things, the status of syntactic agreement projections and constraints on phrase structure and the directionality of movement.

The Syntax of American Sign Language: Functional Categories and Hierarchical Structure

Carol Neidle

MIT Press (MA)

East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture

From henna tattoo kits available at your local mall to “faux Asian” fashions, housewares and fusion cuisine; from the new visibility of Asian film, music, video games and anime to the current popularity of martial arts motifs in hip hop, Asian influences have thoroughly saturated the U.S. cultural landscape and have now become an integral part of the vernacular of popular culture. By tracing cross-cultural influences and global cultural trends, the essays in East Main Street bring Asian American studies, in all its interdisciplinary richness, to bear on a broad spectrum of cultural artifacts. Contributors consider topics ranging from early Asian American movie stars to the influences of South Asian iconography on rave culture, and from the marketing of Asian culture through food to the contemporary clamor for transnational Chinese women’s historical fiction. East Main Street hits the shelves in the midst of a boom in Asian American population and cultural production. This book is essential not only for understanding Asian American popular culture but also contemporary U.S. popular culture writ large.

Arts & Photography

Nishime, Leilani

Dave, Shilpa

Oren, Tasha G.

History & Criticism

NYU Press

Proximities of Calvary:

Christ for the World

Best Book Award Winner Culture Studies/Popular Culture, Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association 
Honorable Mention for the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize for the best-published book in American Studies from the American Studies Association 
Best Book Award for the Social Construction of Race, The American Political Science Association 
Sooner or later every Asian-American must deal with the question "Where do you come from?" It is probably the most familiar if least aggressive form of racism. It is a tip-off to the persistent notion that people of Asian ancestry are not real Americans, that "Orientals" never really stop being loyal to a foreign homeland, no matter how long they or their families have been in this country. Confronting the cultural stereotypes that have been attached to Asian-Americans over the last 150 years, Robert G. Lee seizes the label "Oriental" and asks where it came from. 
The idea of Asians as mysterious strangers who could not be assimilated into the cultural mainstream was percolating to the surface of American popular culture in the mid-nineteenth century, when Chinese immigrant laborers began to arrive in this country in large numbers. Lee shows how the bewildering array of racialized images first proffered by music hall songsters and social commentators have evolved and become generalized to all Asian-Americans, coalescing in particular stereotypes. Whether represented as Pollutant, Coolie, Deviant, Yellow Peril, Model Minority, or Gook, the Oriental is portrayed as alien and a threat to the American family—the nation writ small. 
Refusing to balance positive against negative stereotypes, Lee connects these stereotypes to particular historical moments, each marked by shifting class relations and cultural crises. Seen as products of history and racial politics, the images that have prevailed in songs, fiction, films, and nonfiction polemics are contradictory and complex. Lee probes into clashing images of Asians as (for instance) seductively exotic or devious despoilers of (white) racial purity, admirably industrious or an insidious threat to native laborers. When Lee dissects the ridiculous, villainous, or pathetic characters that amused or alarmed the American public, he finds nothing generated by the real Asian-American experience; whether they come from Gold Rush camps or Hollywood films or the cover of Newsweek, these inhuman images are manufactured to play out America's racial myths. 
Orientals comes to grips with the ways that racial stereotypes come into being and serve the purposes of the dominant culture.

Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture

History

Americas

Temple University Press

Confronting the cultural stereotypes that have been attached to Asian-Americans over the last 150 years, this title seizes the label Oriental and asks where it came from. It shows how the bewildering array of racialized images first proffered by music hall songsters and social commentators have evolved and become generalized to Asian-Americans.

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Book by Wallington, Peter, Lee, Robert G.

Blackstone's Statutes on Public Law and Human Rights (Blackstone's Statute Books)

Peter Wallington

Blackstone Press

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Books by Robert G. Lee