主题语境
人与社会——跨文化沟通
背景导入：手语是聋人交流的主要形式， 已经使用了数百年。然而， 手势只是手语者用来表达意思的多种肢体语言中的一种，非手动元素对手语使用者的重要性你知道吗？
Sign language, the primary① form of communication of the deaf community, has been in use for hundreds of years. You're probably most familiar with American Sign Language, but sign language is used all over the world and has nearly 150 variations②. Sign language interpreters③ can be seen everywhere from classrooms and graduation ceremonies④ to major sporting events.
When you think of sign language, you most likely imagine signers using their hands to form words and letters. However, hands are only one of the many different body language techniques that signers use to get their meaning across⑤. In fact, much of the grammatical structure of sign language is not indicated by the signer's hands.
While the hands are responsible for forming the words themselves, markers called “non-manual elements” control much of the languages' grammatical structure. Non-manual elements (or markers) are body language techniques that don't use the hands. These include head movements, body positioning and facial expressions. Used together with the signs, these elements give sign language a subtle⑥ and extremely complicated⑦ grammatical structure. Linguist Andrea Lackner from Alpcn-Adria University in Austria did a study that shows just how important these non-manual elements are to sign language users.
The study assessed just how many different things non-manual elements can do. For this study, all participants were deaf users of Austrian Sign Language. They watched a video of someone using sign language, and they had to describe the purpose of each non-manual element. The results were very complicated. For instance, things as subtle as the direction of the signer's gaze can indicate whether or not a statement is hypothetical (假设的). A single head movement can indicate the emotion of a statement, or a signer's feelings toward a hypothetical question. Body language is always important, but in sign language, it can change the entire meaning of a sentence！
①primary adj.主要的，首要的
②variation n．变化，变动
③interpreter n．口译者，译员
④graduation ceremony 毕业典礼
⑤get across 使……被理解
⑥subtle adj.敏锐的，有洞察力的；灵活的
⑦complicated adj.复杂的
