ASL Immersion Weekend '96

"How to Identify Proper ASL Grammar"

Featuring
Clayton Valli



This workshop is designed to improve your American Sign Language skills by helping you understand how ASL grammar functions. Mr. Valli will discuss four major lexical categories - nouns, verbs, predicates, and adverbs as well as some minor lexical categories such as determiners, prepositions, conjunctions, and pronouns. By identifying these categories, we can understand the nature of grammar in ASL and see how it works. Additional linguistical aspects - Hold-Movement Sequentiality, Numeral Incorporation, Location, and Lexicalized Fingerspelling - will also be discussed.

ASL Immersion Weekend '96 is open to anyone interested in American Sign Language or the field of interpreting. This includes students of ITPs and sign language programs, interpreters, families and friends of Deaf or hard of hearing individuals, and special education teachers. Clayton's workshop, as well as interaction with other participants throughout the weekend, will offer plenty of opportunities to improve your receptive and expressive skills in a relaxing retreat environment. Through exposure, participants will also gain a deeper understanding of Deaf Culture, and the Deaf community's language: ASL. The Immersion Weekend will be conducted using visual communication; participants will not use their voices.

Mr. Valli will give a performance in ASL poetry on Saturday night.



Born deaf in Newburyport, Massachusetts and raised in Seabrook, New Hampshire, Clayton Valli graduated from Austine School for the Deaf in Brattleboro, Vermont in 1971. He graduated with a B.A. degree in Social Psychology in 1978 from the University of Nevada-Reno, and with an M.A. degree in Linguistics in 1985 from Gallaudet University. He completed his doctorate in Linguistics and ASL Poetics at the Union Institute in Cincinnati Ohio in 1993 and is working as an assistant professor at the Gallaudet University Department of ASL, Linguistics, and Interpretation. Dr. Valli has served as a consultant and a researcher for various sign language research projects, and has presented a variety of workshops and lectures related to ASL Linguistics, ASL Poetry, and Sociolinguistics of the Deaf Community throughout the U.S. and abroad. He has several published books and tapes. As a well-known Deaf American poet, he also has been presenting his performances in ASL poetry. Clayton Valli currently resides in Washington, D.C. and still dreams that someday ASL art and literature will be taught in every school for the Deaf.



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