Linguistic and cultural elements used by deaf authors to create delimited stories in Libras

Abstract

The aim of this article is to describe the linguistic and cultural elements used by deaf authors in the creation of Delimited Stories in Brazilian Sign Language - Libras. Currently, there are a significant number of deaf authors who have produced poems and stories in Libras and, among these, we find Delimited Stories. These can be ABC Stories, represented through the sequential use of the hand configurations of the manual alphabet that goes from A to Z, forming names from the letters; numerical stories, which use the sequence of numbers; stories of a single hand configuration. It is therefore important to understand this aesthetic use of Libras. In order to support this research, we used the concept of norms as a standardization that does not depend on a single individual, but on the whole community (Toury, 1995); the study of the cultural productions of deaf people in Sign Language (Mourão, 2011); and the linguistic and cultural elements that serve to generate an aesthetic effect in poetry in Libras (Sutton-Spence, 2021). In terms of methodology, we present a qualitative and descriptive approach to the linguistic and cultural elements found in the analysis of the Delimited Story presented by the deaf poet Nelson Pimenta, in the form of a video, on the website of the National Institute for Deaf Education - INES. As a result, it was understood that in the creation of Delimited Stories in Libras, deaf authors can make use of linguistic and cultural elements to cause an aesthetic effect, including: symmetry, float, anthropomorphism, classifiers, morphism, lexical synchronicity, space, anticipation and exaggeration. Therefore, it is understood that the standardization of these elements is characterized as norms, which can also be reproduced by translators and interpreters of the Portuguese language pair Libras, in order to present the deaf audience with a text that appeals to the senses and creates an aesthetic experience.