Insights into person deixis

Author: Berenz N.

Source: Sign Language & Linguistics, Volume 5, Number 2, 2002 , pp. 203-226(24)

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Abstract:

Widely accepted analyses of personal pronouns in sign languages present systems that differ in a crucial way from pronominal systems in oral languages and violate linguistic universals proposed by Benveniste, Bühler, Lyons, and others. These analyses argue that the two necessary conversational roles — sender and recipient — are not grammaticized in first and second person pronouns, respectively. This paper presents findings of a detailed analysis of pronominal reference in video-recorded, naturally occurring Brazilian Sign Language conversations which show consistent pairings of form and meaning. On this basis, I argue that the LSB personal pronoun system encodes the two necessary conversational roles. A re-examination of several ASL examples provides additional evidence. I conclude that, in LSB and ASL personal pronouns, space is only epiphenomenal, an idea first articulated by Padden (1990: 118).

Keywords: Brazilian Sign Language; American Sign Language; semantics; deixis; pronouns; temporal and spatial anaphors; lexical anaphors; universals

Document Type: Research article

Affiliations: 1: Inter American University of Puerto Rico/University of the Witwatersrand

Publication date: 2002-01-01