Drawn from the Ground: Sound, Sign and Inscription in Central Australian Sand Stories (Language Culture and Cognition)

Sand stories from Central Australia are a traditional form of Aboriginal women's verbal art that incorporates speech, song, sign, gesture and drawing. Small leaves and other objects may be used to represent story characters. This detailed study of Arandic sand stories takes a multimodal approach to the analysis of the stories and shows how the expressive elements used in the stories are orchestrated together. This richly illustrated volume is essential reading for anyone interested in language and communication. It adds to the growing recognition that language encompasses much more than speech alone, and shows how important it is to consider the different semiotic resources a culture brings to its communicative tasks as an integrated whole rather than in isolation.

Jennifer Green is a Research Fellow in the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne. She has over 30 years' experience working on projects documenting indigenous languages, history and visual arts.