Constructional Approaches to Signed Language

SHERMAN WILCOX; MARTÍNEZ, ROCÍO ANABEL

Cambridge Handbook of Construction Grammar

Cambridge

Año: 2023;

Space and time are fundamental aspects of our experience. They are also fundamental to an embodied approach to cognition and language and factor into several conceptual archetypes that serve as prototypes for clause structure (Langacker, 2008). For example, one conceptual archetype consists of mobile interacting participants occupying locations in space. The com-ponents of this conceptual archetype are manifest as, for example, semantic roles such as agent, patient, experiencer, and so forth. At another level of clause structure, agent orientation reflects our archetypal experience as participants acting energetically on the world, while theme orientation depicts a world in which entities occupy locations and are arranged in cer-tain stable ways. An important feature is the notion of entities occupying locations in space.For signed languages, conceptual archetypes have not only conceptual but also phonological import: signs and signed language constructions are expressed in space. The grammatical and discourse use of space in signed languages has of course been well described. However, the nature of spatial locations has in recent years created theoretical difficulties, with a growing number of sign linguists claiming that spatial locations are unlistable and therefore not lin-guistic; rather, the claim is that spatial locations are gesture, and thus sign constructions in-corporating spatial locations are “language-gesture fusions” (Meier & Lillo-Martin, 2013). In this chapter we adopt a cognitive grammar approach to signed language constructions as complex symbolic assemblies, where a symbolic structure consists of a semantic pole and a phonological pole. Our focus will be on the use of space in grammatical and discourse con-structions that include pointing and placing in different signed languages. Pointing is a ubiquitous feature of the world’s signed languages. Pointing functions as deictic and anaphoric pronouns, possessive and reflexive pronouns, demonstratives, locatives, and the marking of verb agreement. What is rarely observed in sign linguistic research is that pointing is itself a construction. In our chapter we will adopt an approach to the analysis of pointing as a construction consisting of two component structures: a Place and a pointing de-vice (Wilcox & Occhino, 2016). Places are symbolic structures with a semantic pole schemat-ically characterized as a thing, some referent; phonologically a Place is a location in space. The pointing device is also a symbolic structure: the semantic pole directs attention, and the phonological pole is typically an index finger, although the thumb, eye gaze, or body orienta-tion can also serve as a pointing device. The pointing device directs attention to a schematic referent elaborated in a pointing construction by the Place. Related to Places is the function of placing (Martínez & Wilcox, 2019; Wilcox & Martínez, 2020). Placing is the act of locating a linguistic entity at some spatial location; whereas pointing directs attention, placing attracts attention for the purpose of making some conceptual association. Places and placing are used in many signed language constructions. Places appear in anteced-ent and anaphor constructions and list constructions, both of which are types of pointing con-structions. In certain reference point constructions, signs are placed at an existing Place. In these constructions, the existing Place serves as a conceptual reference point, with the placed sign an associated conceptual target. For example, placing the sign meaning “alone” at the spatial location previously identified referentially with tigers (the tiger Place) associates the characteristic of living alone with tigers (Martínez & Wilcox, 2019). Places also appear in verbal constructions (often called “directional” or indicating verbs) incorporating agreement. In this case, schematic Place components in an agreeing verb such as ‘give’ are elaborated by existing nominal Place structures.Signs are not the only linguistic entities which can serve as components in placing construc-tions. The signer may also be placed. In these cases, the signer either moves into a new spatial location, thus occupying the phonological pole of a Place, or orients her body in such a way as to indicate that she now occupies a Place. Placing the signer appears in reported speech constructions: putting the signer’s phonological location in congruence with the phonological location of a Place occupied by another character in the reported speech situation creates a conceptual association of referential identity: the signer “becomes” a character in the reported interaction for the purpose of “speaking for the character.”In other constructions, placing the signer in congruence with the phonological location of a Place creates a conceptual association with a participant in a fictive interaction. A signer may also partition herself, with each partitioned articulator indicating a different aspect of the sign-er’s conceptualization (Dudis, 2004). We show that these partitioned expressions are best an-alyzed as placing constructions. For example, while occupying a narrator Place the signer may describe a situation such as the fact that many deaf people are underemployed; the signer then orients her head in a different direction and shows disgust on her face, indicating a fic-tive conversation with a virtual interlocutor, “Isn’t this disgusting?” In this case, the parti-tioned placing construction is used to express both an objective scene (the underemployment situation) and the signer’s stance towards that objective content. This and other stance con-structions commonly use Places (in which the semantic pole of the Place is one aspect of a complex conceptualization) and placing. In all of these cases, the general constructional mechanism is the same: by putting the phono-logical pole of the placed sign or the signer in congruence with the phonological pole of an existing Place, the semantic poles are thereby put into association — a manifestation of the conceptual metaphor SIMILARITY IS PROXIMITY. The precise nature of the association de-pends on the particular construction and the communicative context.We intend to describe these constructions using data primarily from Argentine Sign Language and American Sign Language, but also with reported data from other signed languages. We also hope to show that a cognitive grammar approach handles spatial location in a more natu-ral way, resolving the need to posit artificial distinctions between linguistic and non-linguistic (gestural) spatial locations in signed language constructions.