Place in nominal and verbal constructions in signed language narratives

MARTÍNEZ, ROCÍO ANABEL; WILCOX, SHERMAN

Albuquerque

Congreso; 13th Biennial Conference of the High Desert Linguistic Society; 2018

High Desert Linguistics Society (HDLS), University of New Mexico

Our paper will present part of an on-going project on pointing and placing in signed language discourse. According to Martínez & Wilcox (to appear), pointing and placing are grammatical strategies for achieving nominal grounding in Argentine Sign Language (LSA); these phenomena, however, appear in many, if not all, signed languages. Wilcox & Occhino (2016) state that pointing is a construction consisting of two symbolic components: a pointing device which directs attention, and a Place. A Place is a symbolic structure consisting of schematic semantic and phonological poles, which means that the location of the sign is not a meaningless phonological parameter, but part of a meaningful unit. In placing, signers produce a sign at a Place. Two types of Placing constructions have been identified, each serving distinct functions: Placing-for-Creating, which creates a Place, and Placing-by-Recruiting, which associates lexical content with an existing Place. In this presentation, we adopt a cognitive grammar approach (Langacker 1987, 1991, 2008, 2016) to explore the connection that the Place symbolic unit creates between nominal and verbal constructions based on data from narratives primarily in LSA, but also including ASL and other signed languages. We discuss whether Place is the symbolic unit that nominal and verbal constructions have in common to recruit and track correspondent things (in cognitive terms) within and throughout clauses in narrative discourses. We expect this work to contribute to a discourse-based account of agreement in signed languages, a topic that has been hotly debated among linguists (Liddell, 2011; Lillo-Martin & Meier, 2011; Nevins, 2011; Wilbur, 2013). As well as Barlow (1999), we believe that a discourse perspective avoids the problems inherent in formal (syntactic) approaches and clarifies the connections between agreement and anaphora.