Indicating verbs in British Sign Language favour motivated use of space

• Authors: Kearsy Cormier , Jordan Fenlon , Adam Schembri
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Sign languages have traditionally been described as having a distinction between (1) arbitrary (referential or syntactic) space, considered to be a purely grammatical use of space in which locations arbitrarily represent concrete or abstract subject and/or object arguments using pronouns or indicating verbs, for example, and (2) motivated (topographic or surrogate) space, involving mapping of locations of concrete referents onto the signing space via classifier constructions. Some linguists have suggested that it may be misleading to see the two uses of space as being completely distinct from one another. In this study, we use conversational data from the British Sign Language Corpus (www.bslcorpusproject.org) to look at the use of space with modified indicating verbs – specifically the directions in which these verbs are used as well as the co-occurrence of eyegaze shifts and constructed action. Our findings suggest that indicating verbs are frequently produced in conditions that use space in a motivated way and are rarely modified using arbitrary space. This contrasts with previous claims that indicating verbs in BSL prototypically use arbitrary space. We discuss the implications of this for theories about grammaticalisation and the role of gesture in sign languages and for sign language teaching.

Keywords

EN

agreement; directional; topographic; arbitrary; referential; constructed action; role shift; eyegaze; grammaticalisation

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Open Linguistics
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 1
• Issue: 1

Dates

received

2015-02-01

accepted

2015-10-09

online

2015-11-30

Contributors

author

Kearsy Cormier

• Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre, University College London,
  London WC1H 0PD, United Kingdom

author

Jordan Fenlon

• Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA

author

Adam Schembri

• Department of Languages and Linguistics, La Trobe University, Melbourne Victoria, 3086 Australia; Department
  of English Language and Applied Linguistics, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, United Kingdom

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Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/opli-2015-0025