Beyond the Hands: Completion of the ASL Linguistics for Practitioners Trilogy

Today we celebrate the completion of a project seven years in the making. The third volume of the ASL Linguistics for Practitioners series, Beyond the Hands: Non-Manual Grammar, Discourse Structure, and Sentence Types in American Sign Language, co-authored with Janna Sweenie, is now available. This episode explores what the book is, why it matters, and what it reveals about language, embodiment, and the nature of human communication.

Let me begin with a claim that may seem strange if your experience with language has been limited to speaking and listening: The face is grammar.

Not expression. Not emotion. Not accompaniment. Grammar.

In American Sign Language, the eyebrows mark the difference between a statement and a question. The mouth produces morphemes that modify meaning. The head nods and shakes with grammatical force. The eyes point to referents and track agreement across discourse. The body shifts to mark perspective and emphasis.

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Standard Deviation

You have a number.

Not your phone number. Not your social security number, though that one matters more than most of us like to think about. I mean another number, one that follows you through databases you will never see, aggregated from purchases you barely remember making, from the length of time you hovered over a photograph before scrolling past, from the route you took to work last Tuesday and whether you lingered outside that coffee shop or walked directly to the train.

This number has a name in China. They call it a Social Credit Score. But the American version has no single name because it has no single keeper. It lives distributed across credit bureaus and insurance actuaries, across hiring algorithms and rental application systems, across the predictive models that decide whether you see an advertisement for a luxury watch or a payday loan.

You did not consent to being numbered. But you are numbered nonetheless.

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Depicting Space: When Language Lives in the Hands

Let me start with a confession. Classifiers are hard. Not hard in the way vocabulary is hard, where you simply need more exposure, more repetition, more time. Classifiers are hard because they require signers to think spatially while signing temporally, to track multiple referents while producing new content, to select among productive options while maintaining discourse coherence.

That mouthful of a sentence appears in the opening of Depicting Space, and I want to unpack it for you, because hidden inside that description is something important about human cognition.

When you speak English, your words unfold in time. One after another. Linear. Sequential. The sentence has a beginning, a middle, an end. You cannot say two words simultaneously. The channel is narrow.

But when you sign ASL, something different happens. Your hands can represent two entities at once. Your face carries grammatical information independent of your hands. Your body can shift to become a character while your hands continue to manipulate objects in observer space. The channel is wide. Parallel processing becomes possible.

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Civility Certified: A Dossier Novella

For Civility Certified, I worked with three sources.

The first is Martin Luther's 95 Theses from 1517. Luther posted his propositions to the church door at Wittenberg, demanding that the institution admit what it was doing - selling salvation, monetizing grace, creating a credential system for the afterlife. The structure of numbered propositions, posted to the institutional door, demanding accountability - that form echoes throughout this novella. There is a character who writes theses. The institution does not welcome them.

The second source is Jefferson Davis's address to the Confederate Congress in 1861. This gave me the rhetorical DNA of exclusion dressed as protection. Davis spoke of voluntary participation, states' rights, procedural legitimacy - all while encoding slavery into the constitutional fabric of the Confederacy. The Civic Trust & Access Authority in my novella speaks in that register. It promises safety. It delivers sorting.

The third source is Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin from 1925 - specifically, his theoretical writings on dialectical montage. Eisenstein believed that meaning emerges from the collision of images, that the audience assembles truth from fragments. This novella works the same way. You receive documents out of sequence. You reconstruct causation. You become complicit in the interpretation.

Three sources. Three different centuries. Three different forms of institutional power confronting individual resistance. And from their collision, a new story emerges - one that feels disturbingly contemporary.

 

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The Somnambulist's Prophecy

Have you ever dreamed something true?

Not metaphorically true. Not symbolically true. Actually true. You dreamed your phone would ring, and it rang. You dreamed someone was sick before anyone told you. You dreamed a door opening that hadn't opened yet.

Most of us have had this experience at least once. We wake up unsettled, the dream still clinging, and then something happens that makes us pause. Makes us wonder. We shake it off. We tell ourselves it was coincidence, pattern-matching, the brain's talent for finding connections where none exist. We go on with our day.

But what if you couldn't shake it off?

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The Corollary of Every Prayer

What does it mean to say amen? 

We say it reflexively. The minister concludes the prayer, and the congregation responds. Amen. So be it. Let it be done. The word carries the weight of assent, of agreement, of complicity in whatever petition has just been offered to the divine.

But what happens when someone refuses to say it?

I want to explore the larger project of what I've been calling Fractional Fiction. Because the two are inseparable. The methodology creates the meaning, and the meaning demands the methodology.

Let me start with a scene.

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The Held Land: A Fractional Fiction

The Held Land tells three stories across 159 years, all rooted in a single quarter-section of Nebraska prairie. In March 1867, Ezekiel Washington, a Black veteran of the 5th United States Colored Troops, files a homestead claim on 160 acres. He builds a soddie with his own hands, breaks the sod, plants corn, and waits for the land to become his. Five years later, a rigged hearing strips him of everything. He walks off the land he made productive with nothing but his discharge papers and disappears from the historical record. 

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