Participants should be familiar with the following concepts, as only a refresher will be provided: constructed action, classifiers, partitioning, unrealized inceptives, and indicating verbs. This session bring these aspects together for working and aspiring interpreters. This workshop presents the view that English linguistic items and structures evoke conceptual content that can guide interpretation. Once we see these structures and how they symbolize meaning as they are derived from conceptualization, the depiction options narrow to a more suitable list. Construal will be of paramount importance and will be discussed at length with detailed attention given to cognitive semantics. For example, these four sentences evoke three different scenes:

The farmer caught the rabbit
The rabbit was caught by the former
The rabbit was caught
I saw the farmer catch the rabbit

All four of these structures can inform how we construct our interpretation. Simply examining the vantage point they provide can narrow the options of who to become (constructed action/surrogate). Examining these constructions in terms of passive vs. active voice can also guide our options.

When interpreters internalize how structures in language evoke not only conceptual content, but also a specific way of viewing said content (the construal), the method of depicting the construal will become more apparent. Workshop participants will first work sentence by sentence to examine structures in source messages, discuss the options to depict, and then reexamine all structures to constrict the available options in order to construct a truly equivalent target message. *Presented in ASL*