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American Sign Language: "every weekend"
Cami Smith asks: "Hi I have a quick question. What is the correct way to sign every weekend? I can't imagine signing weekend multiple times in a row. Too awkward."
Dr. Bill replies: Approaches to signing "every weekend " will vary depending on the context.
1. In a low-context situation you can sign "EACH WEEKEND" to mean "every weekend." The sign "EVERY" tends to use two movements in its citation (isolated or dictionary entry) form but when you compound (join it together) with WEEKEND you reduce the two movements of EVERY to just one movement (thus causing EVERY to look like the citation form of EACH). This same change (from a two movement version of EVERY to a one movement version) also happens when signing concepts such as "EVERYONE," "EVERY-TIME" and "EVERYTHING."
2. Another approach is to sign "every-SATURDAY_(shift)_every-SUNDAY" (using the downward sweep movement version of SATURDAY and also SUNDAY) as a phrase meaning "every Saturday and Sunday" -- which can be thought of as meaning "every weekend."
3. An approach that makes use of "context" (which we could call a "high context" approach) is to rely on other signs in the sentence to convey the meaning of "every" and apply it to "weekend." For example: WE-TWO-[other-person-and-I] ATTEND WEEKEND. ("He/she/they and I go every weekend.") Thus the sign WEEKEND is made plural (weekend becomes "weekends") by signing "GO" twice. When you sign "GO" twice it means to go repeatedly or to "attend regularly."
Therefore the correct sign for "every weekend" or "weekends" is going to depend on whether you are in a high context situation or a low context situation. One of the reasons why it is obvious whether or not a person is a beginning signer is that they sign almost everything as if they were in a low context situation. Beginners tend to use more signs in a sentence than necessary (instead of relying on context to save time and effort.) The importance of context in determining the "correct" way to sign something is also one of the reasons why I prefer to teach with a student assistant in an interactive situation—since doing so provides "context."
See: WEEKEND
See: WEEK
See: WEEK-(advanced)
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