Place and the ground in signed languages

WILCOX, SHERMAN; MARTÍNEZ, ROCÍO ANABEL

Norwich

Congreso; DCOMM Conference - Deictic Communication. Theory and Application.; 2019

University of East Anglia

Within the cognitive framework (Langacker, 1987, 1991, 2001, 2008), the ground (the speech event, the speaker and hearer, their interaction, and the immediate circumstances, i.e., time and place of speech) is typically considered a conceptual notion. It is one among the cognitive domains capable of being evoked as the conceptual base for the meaning of linguistic elements (Langacker, 2001: 144). However, for this presentation we would like to claim that for signed languages, the ground plays a significant role not only at the conceptual base but also at the phonological pole of linguistic units: signs are produced in the physical ground; entities that are perceptually accessible in the ground are pointed to; the phonological pole of the symbolic unit called Place (Martínez and Wilcox, 2018) is a location in signing space, which is in the ground; the grounding strategy of ?placing? recruits existing locations (as the phonological pole of existing Places or entities that are perceptually accessible in the ground) or creates new Places with a phonological location in the ground. In order to discuss this, we analyzed qualitatively the use of Place throughout narratives in Argentine Sign Language (LSA). Following Martínez and Wilcox?s (2018) cognitive approach, we define Place not as a phonological parameter (location) but as a symbolic unit formed by a phonological pole (location) and a semantic pole (thing). We used ELAN to code the Places throughout the narratives. In the constructions in which the Place symbolic structure could be identified we specified information on the phonological pole of the Place (the specific location in signing space) and on the semantic pole of the Place (thing). Since the latter is rather schematic, we analyzed the way the semantic pole of the Place is elaborated in discourse in our narrative data. Then we analyzed the types of placing throughout discourse, focusing on the way the ground was (or was not) incorporated in the phonological and/or semantic pole of Place for the identification of referents. Our analysis showed that in LSA, the ground is capable of being evoked not only as the conceptual base but also as the phonological pole of Place. Specifically, we found that for LSA, the signing space ?which is part of the ground? not only is ?semantically loaded?, as Engberg-Pedersen (1993) states for Danish Sign Language, but also ?phonologically loaded?. Although there are no strict rules, the choice of a specific location in signing space for placing and pointing to anaphoric referents in discourse or to perceptually accessible entities in the ground is not completely random or unlistable. On the contrary, it is influenced by discursive patterns of use, which involves abstractions of both conceptual and phonological associations from actual usage events as well as deictic strategies for incorporating entities that are accessible in the ground.