To consider engagement with everyday practice, we look at one monologic narrative in American Sign Language (ASL) (Dunn, 2021) from the O5S5 ASL data (Hochgesang et al., 2021) in which a deaf person describes her experience going to the grocery store for the first time during the pandemic and she needs to wear a mask. The signs she uses for mask, while referring to a real object, transform into a metaphorical barrier to the hearing space she needs to navigate. The crux of the narrative is to highlight how she experienced masking as a literal silencing, her inability to communicate with hearing employees who were masked while physically distancing.

Our presentation will walk through a microanalysis of each instance of [MASK] and look at how the sequential variations in sign choice reflect different conceptualizations of the experience of being a signing deaf person in a hearing space. Over the trajectory of the narrative, we see how depiction (Dudis, 2011) figures in the innovative expression of the concept [MASK] which takes on at least five symbolic forms in this particular piece. At the time of its creation, the narrative encapsulated a very ordinary moment in the life of deaf people at the beginning of the pandemic. To relay this ordinary moment, as we will show, required multiple linguistic innovations representing the mask itself and more importantly the experience of being stifled in (extra)ordinary ways.