Gesture in sign language discourse

Liddell, Scott K.; Metzger, Melanie

doi:10.1016/s0378-2166(98)00061-7

Cited by 183 publications

(87 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…This is despite the fact that such a possibility has already been raised in the literature: Engberg-Pedersen (2003) specifically addressed this issue for Danish Sign Language by discussing the difference between 'reference-tracking eye gaze' which she claims occurs with predicates or pronominal pointing signs and carries an indexic function in contrast to 'imitative eye gaze' (i.e., part of constructed action) which occurs with predicates or quotations and is not indexic. Liddell & Metzger (1998) explicitly argued against eyegaze as an agreement marker. They proposed that during periods of constructed action, the information that is expressed is more than simply spatial loci associated with the subject and object -it also includes information about the overall mental space which the signer is communicating about and which the addressee is constructing.4 The main question that can help address this issue is about the nature of the articulators that are involved in constructed action when it co-occurs with indicating verbs.…”

Section: Indicating Verbs Shifted Use Of Space and Constructed Actionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Indicating verbs in British Sign Language favour motivated use of space

Cormier¹,

Fenlon²,

Schembri³

2015

Open Linguistics

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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.

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Section: Indicating Verbs Shifted Use Of Space and Constructed Actionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This would also indicate that eyegaze tends not to function as 'reference-tracking eye-gaze' (i.e. eyegaze which has been argued to be an agreement marker) but instead as a marker of constructed action (i.e., as 'imitative eye gaze') (EngbergPedersen 2003, Liddell and Metzger 1998).…”

Section: Research Questions and Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Indicating verbs in British Sign Language favour motivated use of space

Cormier¹,

Fenlon²,

Schembri³

2015

Open Linguistics

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“…We will establish this generalization on the basis of ASL data, and then we will extend it to LSF. We should note at the outset that this generalization need not be surprising from the perspective of sign language research: Attitude Role Shift is often treated as a kind of quotation, and the broader category of 'constructed action' is used to refer to cases in which the speaker in some way imitates properties of a reported speech act or action (see for instance Liddell & Metzger 1998). In addition, the 'shifted attribution of expressive elements' under Role Shift has been described by several sign language researchers; see for instance Sandler & Lillo-Martin 2006 (p. 382), who in turn cite Engberg-Pedersen 1993.…”

Section: Quotation Of Paralinguistic Materialsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Super monsters II: Role Shift, iconicity and quotation in sign language

Schlenker¹

2017

S&P

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“…For manual gesture, we made a three-way distinction between character viewpoint gesture, other gesture, and no gesture. This simplified scheme reflects the fact that our notion of "activity" is specifically linked to character viewpoint, and the fact that speakers have been shown to use similar behaviors as signers when adopting character perspective, such as the combined use of manual character viewpoint gestures with character facial displays (Liddell & Metzger 1998;Earis & Cormier 2013) or the systematic use of gaze to differentiate viewpoint (Sweetser & Stec, in press). …”

Section: Multimodal Articulatorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multimodal analysis of quotation in oral narratives

2015

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Abstract:We investigate direct speech quotation in informal oral narratives by analyzing the contribution of bodily articulators (character viewpoint gestures, character facial expression, character intonation, and the meaningful use of gaze) in three quote environments, or quote sequences -single quotes, quoted monologues and quoted dialogues -and in initial vs. non-initial position within those sequences. Our analysis draws on findings from the linguistic and multimodal realization of quotation, where multiple articulators are often observed to be co-produced with single direct speech quotes (e.g. Thompson & Suzuki 2014), especially on the so-called left boundary of the quote (Sidnell 2006). We use logistic regression to model multimodal quote production across and within quote sequences, and find unique sets of multimodal articulators accompanying each quote sequence type. We do not, however, find unique sets of multimodal articulators which distinguish initial from non-initial utterances; utterance position is instead predicted by type of quote and presence of a quoting predicate. Our findings add to the growing body of research on multimodal quotation, and suggest that the multimodal production of quotation is more sensitive to the number of characters and utterances which are quoted than to the difference between introducing and maintaining a quoted characters' perspective.

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Gesture in sign language discourse

Cited by 183 publications

References 6 publications

Indicating verbs in British Sign Language favour motivated use of space

Indicating verbs in British Sign Language favour motivated use of space

Super monsters II: Role Shift, iconicity and quotation in sign language

Multimodal analysis of quotation in oral narratives

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