Table Of Content

UC Berkeley Dissertations, Department of Linguistics Title Person and Deixis in Brazilian Sign Language Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7x34h8f0 Author Berenz, Norine Publication Date 1996 eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California P er so n and d e eo s in Brazil ian S ig n Language by Norine Frances Berenz B.S. (University of California, Berkeley) 1982 MA (University of California, Berkeley) 1986 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics in the GRADUATE DIVISION of the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY Committee in charge: Professor Eve E. Sweetser, Chair Professor Leanne Hinton Professor Charles J . Fillmore Professor John J. Gumperz 1996 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. This dissertation of Norine Frances Berenz is approved: <f. /SrVo** '?£, chair y date to date I * Msut x date date University of California, Berkeley 1996 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Person and Deixis in Brazilian Sign Language Copyright (1996) by Norine Frances Berenz Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. To Kweli, who was there all the time. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Table of Contents Typographical and notational conventions vii Acknowledgements ix 1. Background 1.1 An overview of the work to be presented 1 1.2 A capsule history of sign language research 4 1.3 The Brazilian context 12 2. Analyses of deixis and person based on spoken languages 2.1 Introduction 21 2.1.1 Deixis vs. indexicality 23 2.1.2 Deixis vs. anaphora 25 2.1.3 Deixis differently subdivided 30 2.1.3.1 Gestural vs. symbolic uses 31 2.1.3.2 Gestural and symbolic vs. anaphoric and non-anaphoric uses 35 2.1.3.3 Gesture and language 43 2.2 The development of the notion of deixis 45 2.3 Personal pronouns vs. demonstrative adverbsa nd pronouns 53 2.4 Participant roles and the nonparticipant 57 2.5 Deictic projection 73 2.6 Relevance of the theoretical notions to the present study 73 3. Form-based analyses of sign language pronouns 3.1 Pointing or points? 75 3.2 Kegl: The body pronoun model 79 3.2.1 Body pronouns and the semantics of person 81 3.2.2 Body pronouns and body shift 87 3.3 Liddell: The surrogates and tokens model 88 3.3.1 Fauconnier’s mental spaces, Buhler’s modes, and Liddell’s model 89 3.3.2 Vertical and horizontal variability in the performance of verbs and pronouns 96 3.3.3 The co-articulation of gesture and language in the gestural- visual channel 103 3.4 Lillo-Martin and Klima: The one-to-many and many-to-one model 110 3.4.1 Referential loci and unambiguous reference 111 3.4.1.1 Linguistic space and geometric space: Same or different? 112 3.4.1.2 The personal pronoun system vs. other coreference strategies 120 3.4.2 Shifting reference: referential locus or rhetorical practice 125 3.4.3 Personless personal pronoun? 128 3.5 Too many distinctions, and too few 129 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 4. Meaning-based analyses of sign language pronouns 4.1 Ahlgren: The Demonstrative Hypothesis 132 4.2 Meier: The Sender Only Hypothesis 137 4.2.1 The influence of communicative modality 138 4.2.2 Linguistic universals 144 4.2.2.1 Linguistic status of deictic points 145 4.2.2.2 Grammatical person 153 4.2.2.3 Person distinctions 160 4.2.2.3.1 The first/nonfirst distinction in ASL 162 4.2.2.3.2 Addressee as a phonological element 164 4.2.2.3.3 Arguments from shifted reference 170 4.2.2.3.4 Eyegaze and person distinctions 176 4.2.2.3.5 Multiple nonparticipant references 184 4.2.3 Conclusions 190 4.3 The body coordinates model 191 4.3.1 Body coordinates in spoken and signed languages 192 4.3.2 Laterality as a phonological feature 197 4.3.3 Body coordinates in narrative 199 5. Deictic and anaphoric reference in Brazilian Sign Tjmguage 5.1 Introduction 207 5.2 The LSB data 209 5.3 Personal pronouns 211 5.3.1 Forms of the singular 212 5.3.1.1 Common singulars 220 5.3.1.1.1 Deictic terms vs. anaphoric terms 222 5.3.1.1.2 Demonstratives vs. personal pronouns 226 5.3.1.1.3 Third person and the present/nonpresent distinction 229 5.3.1.1.4 Text deictic use of the third person pronoun 231 5.3.1.2 Special uses of the second person pronoun 236 5.3.1.3 Shielded third person form 243 5.3.2 Dual pronouns 245 5.3.3 Multiple pronouns 253 5.3.4 Possessive pronouns and adjectives 260 5.3.5 Alternate forms 267 5.3.5.1 B-handshape alternates 267 5.3.5.2 Assimilated handshapes and colloquial forms 274 5.3.6 Nonsyntactic anaphor, sloppy identity, ambiguity and LSB 276 5.4 Special anaphors 280 5.4.1 Temporal anaphors 281 5.4.2 Spatial anaphors 288 5.5 Pronominal function of phonologically reduced nominals and namesigns 293 6. Implications of findings from sign language research for theories of deixis 302 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Bibliography Appendix A: ASCII-Stokoe Notation Appendix B: Figures Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Typographic and Notational Conventions The typographic conventions employed in the text are these. Besides titles of books, italic type is used for mentions of words and for first use of technical terms (repeated where it seems necessary to improve readability of the text). Bold type indicates that that word in a sequence takes stress. Single quotes are used for glosses and double quotes for quotation or when I am hedging on a use I put a term to. Underlining is intended to call attention to the part of an example specially relevant to the discussion. I have preserved the typographic conventions of the source in quoted material, which therefore may differ from my own. These, I hope, will be interpretable in context. Following common practice in sign language studies, glosses for signs are presented in upper case letters. However, I use small caps to distinguish sign glosses from the names of sign languages, which may be given as a series of three upper case letters -- ASL (American Sign Language), Brazilian Sign Language (LSB), SSL (Swedish Sign Language), etc. A hyphen is used to connect several words when no single English word renders the meaning of the sign, ex. LSB CAN’T-DO; a plus symbol between two words indicates a compound sign, ex.LSB MALE+SHORT ‘boy’. Glosses for fingerspelled LSB loansigns are rendered in Portuguese in small caps with the extension -fs and followed by the closest English equivalent in parentheses and single quotes; example, TODOS-fs (‘all’). Eyegaze direction, where transcribed, is indicated by an overline above the gloss, as are a number of other nonmanual elements which are simultaneous with the manual component. Bracketing with I or r subscripts indicates that the sequence was signed from a position left or Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. viii right, respectively, of the signer’s neutral position. (The convention of shifting out of the neutral position will be discussed in section 3.4.2 and again in sections 4.2.2.3.1 and 4.2.2.3.3., from which the following example is taken.) (4.8) gaze forward______________ YESTERDAY I SEE ANN gaze right__________________________ 1 [ I YOU LOOK-FOR ^ durational]] j gaze left_____________ _______n e£ r [ “well” HIDE Ur gaze forward________ __________ topic neg I WANT AVOID NO ‘Yesterday I saw Ann. (Ann:) “I’ve been looking for you.” (Me:) “Well, I haven’t been hiding.” I wasn’t trying to avoid (her).’ In this example, “well” represents a nonmanual element — here, a shrug with up-turned and open hands -- the status of which as linguistic or gestural is not yet certain. The identities of the reported signers are given in parentheses since these are contextually determined and not asserted. The object of the verb AVOID is also interpretable from context. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.