Publications

Publication details [#63921]

Sze, Felix, Monica Xiao Wei and Aaron Yiu Leung Wong. 2018. Gender variation in signs of sexual behaviour in Hong Kong Sign Language. Asia-Pacific Language Variation 4 (1) : 1–35.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/aplv

Annotation

This paper discusses possible gender variation in the signs of sexual behaviour in Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL). The data comes from a research project that aims at documenting and analyzing sex-related signs in this sign language for the sake of producing materials for sex education and interpreter training programs. Since sex is a highly taboo topic, euphemistic signs for the target concepts were collected and analyzed. This paper presents evidence that linguistic variation of neutral and euphemistic expressions of sex-related concepts exists in HKSL, and that gender plays a role in the choice of some but not all variants and their euphemistic counterparts.