Signing space and its referential uses

The signing space is a three-dimensional area in front of the body of a signer which encompasses the head as well as the area in the shoulder wide (Klima & Bellugi 1979). It is described to have a shape of a ‘bubble’(Kegl 2004) and is considered to be an extension of the body (Fekete 2010), being the most important component of signing communication.

The size of the signing space varies and thus it might get bigger or smaller depending on pragmatic factors such as the register or the context of usage. For instance, the whispering space in Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) is used for conversations of private situations in public (Twilhaar & van den Bogaerde 2016). The (default) size of the signing space differs between urban and rural sign languages⁶. While in urban sign languages (i.e.

5 Constructed action, also known as role/referential shift is defined as a frequent discourse strategy used in sign languages, in which signers use their manual and non-manual articulators including body, hands, and facial expressions, to report actions, thoughts, feelings and attitudes of the referents (Metzger 1995).

6 Bauer (2014: 10-31) differentiates between four different types of sign languages: (i) Deaf community sign languages used by large sign language communities in urban contexts (i.e. ASL); (ii) Emerging sign languages, which have a relatively younger age (i.e. Nicaraguan Sign Language); (iii) Village sign languages, distinguished from deaf community sign languages by four parameters, including socio- economic and demographic settings, social homogeneity, (socio)linguistic context and degree of endangerment (i.e.

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American Sign Language (ASL)) the signing space does not extend beyond the waist of the signer and only the area in front and to the sides of the body is used, in rural sign languages the signing space can be extended to include the whole body, even the back side of it (i.e.

Adamorabe Sign Language, Kata Kolok, Yolngu Sign Language) (for examples and further details on the usage of signing space in rural sign languages see (Nyst 2007; Marsaja 2008;

de Vos 2012; Bauer 2014)). The differences in the size of signing space in urban and rural sign languages can be seen in Figure 1.1 below⁷.

Figure 1.1: Size of the signing space

The signing space is the core of the visual-spatial grammar and expresses a multitude of different functions such as phonological, morphological, morpho-syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. Among those, the primarily function of the signing space is articulatory. That is, this area including body of the signer is used for production of the signs (Poizner, Klima &

Bellugi 1987; Brentari 1998). Another function serves to express morphological structures

Adamorabe Sign Language), and (iv) Alternate sign languages, being a heterogeneous group often shared by hearing and deaf members of the community (i.e. Australian Aboriginal Sign Languages). In this dissertation only the general distinction between urban and rural sign languages is followed.

7 The figures are taken from Bauer (2014).

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such as compounds (Aronoff, Meir & Sandler 2005) as well as morpho-syntactic features (i.e. arguments of the verbs via verb agreement (Padden 1990)) or plurality (Pfau &

Steinbach 2006)).

The signing space can also be used to convey linguistic meaning at the sentence and utterance level (Perniss 2012; Barberà 2012; Engberg-Pedersen 1993), especially to express and track reference in signed contexts including pronominal reference, which is among the most debatable and intriguing topics in sign linguistics literature. This dissertation aims to further explore the referential usage of space and contribute to the ongoing debate.

In expressing reference, the signing space has been considered to have two different usages: topographic and syntactic (Poizner, Klima & Bellugi 1987). It needs to be emphasized that these two usages are not considered to be discrete by all researchers, in fact it has been observed that a single locus can be used to realize both syntactic and topographic aspects of the signing space. A typical example of those overlapping functions is the introduction of a referent via classifier predicate depicting a particular topographic location (e.g. a sick/tired woman lying on a couch) followed by an agreement verb aASKb using abstract space⁸. Then, the verb can be directed from the same locus (e.g. a woman asking for a coffee from her husband) to an earlier specified location so that it’s start and end points indicate the verbal arguments (see Perniss 2012: 416 and references thereof, for parallel examples).

Other studies suggest a so-called integrated or motivated view of the signing space, which eliminates the abstract dimension and advocates only topographic usage both for classifier predicates and verbal agreement as well as anaphoric reference (Liddell 1990;

8 Note that by convention, the subscripts (a,b) indicate initial and final loci marked via agreement verb ASK in the signing space. In the following chapters R(right)-L(eft) and ipsi (lateral) and contra (lateral) will be used to indicate loci in the signing space.

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Liddell 2003; van Hoek 1992; Cormier, Fenlon & Schembri 2015; Fenlon, Schembri &

Cormier 2018). These spatial functions are tested in a few experimental studies (Emmorey, Corina & Bellugi 1995; MacSweeney et al. 2002), however they present conflicting evidence for and against differential usages of the signing space (the reader is referred to Barberà (2012: 44–45) for a critical overview). To emphasize my position with respect to the referential functions of the signing space in this dissertation, I will distinguish between syntactic and topographic space but I will also acknowledge that the distinction can be rather flued and I leave it to the data to speak for itself (see discussion on perspective taking in Chapter 3).

Topographic space is used primarily to express spatial relations between people or other animate/inanimate entities (i.e. objects) relative to each other mapped from real or imagined spatial setting (Emmorey 2002; Perniss 2007; Perniss 2012). The exact placement of entities in this type of space is of great importance as any change can cause differences in meaning. This function of space is conventionally associated with iconic usage of the visual modality, flexible utilization of all three dimensions of the signing space, noun phrases followed by classifier constructions, complex predicates which encode semantic (i.e.

animacy) or iconic (i.e. shape) properties of the referents (Emmorey, Corina & Bellugi 1995;

Perniss 2012). Descriptions of the spatial settings, such as various landmarks, city or country maps, plans of buildings or convention centers, static and motion events are the most typical areas where topographic space is used. Most of the research concerning expression of reference is conducted in relation to topographic space (Emmorey 1996; Perniss 2007;

Perniss & Özyürek 2008; Arık 2009; Pyers, Perniss & Emmorey 2015; Sümer, Perniss &

Özyürek 2016). This is mainly due to the observation that signers make use of this spatial function quite frequently (Bahan & Petitto 1980; Geraci 2014).

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Syntactic space is used to express syntactic (i.e. verb agreement) or discourse related aspects (i.e. reference tracking). Referents are arbitrarily associated with the locations in the signing space, called Referential loci (R-loci) and changes in the placement of these loci do not have any effect on their truth-conditional meaning (Barberà 2012).

As opposed to a more flexible usage of the three dimensional areas in topographic space, the usage of the syntactic space is constrained to three specific planes and their trajectories which are the frontal/ventral/sagittal plane, the midsagittal plane and the horizontal/transverse plane defined by taking the signer’s body as the origin (Brentari 1998:

120). Thus, the frontal plane is the dimension parallel to the body (y-axis), the midsagittal plane lies perpendicular to the body (z-axis) and the horizontal plane is positioned diagonally extending on the lateral sides of the body (x-axis), see Figure 1.2 below.

Figure 1.2: Depiction of signing space: all three planes combined (A), each plane shown separately from left to right: frontal plane, midsagittal plane and horizontal plane (B)

Grammatical functions of the frontal and midsagittal planes of the signing space have been investigated relatively recently, but only for a number of sign languages (Barberà 2012). For instance, in Catalan Sign Language (LSC) the upper and lower dimensions or

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areas of the frontal plane were documented being used to express different levels of specificity, hierarchical relations, locatives, and the items absent from physical context (Barberà 2012: 114). Moreover, recent analyses of agreement verbs have indicated combined usages of the planes (i.e. horizontal midsagittal or x+z axis) based on the direction of the path movement of the verbs (Padden et al. 2010; Cormier, Fenlon & Schembri 2015).

Among the three spatial planes mentioned above, the horizontal plane has been investigated the most in sign languages and is used to express a number of various grammatical functions such as plurality (Pfau & Steinbach 2006), reciprocity (Pfau & Steinbach 2003), contrast (Wilbur & Patschke 1998; Winston 1991), comparison (Aristodemo & Geraci 2017), aspect (Rathmann 2005), verb agreement (Padden 1990) as well as the expression of timelines (Engberg-Pedersen 1993) and tracking of discourse referents (Friedman 1975; Barberà 2012). This dissertation focuses on the latter function and aims to further explore the horizontal dimension of the signing space with a specific focus on discourse-semantics.

In their formal account of reference tracking in DGS, Steinbach and Onea (2016) differentiate between the horizontal space (H-space) as being an actual or physical space and the analytical space (A-space), which semantically represents the H-space. I adapt the authors’ terminology in line with their proposal which suggests that the A-space can be decomposed into two major (potentially recursive) areas: R(ight) and L(eft)⁹. Hence, discourse referents’ distribution is licensed by spatial defaults based on particular ordering of these two spatial divisions (details of this approach are further elaborated in Chapter 2). I will provide further data to show that these spatial defaults can be used for the interpretation

9 Note that Right and Left are abstractions from the physical space and depending on the handedness of a signer can be realized differently (i.e. Left as contralateral for right-handed but ipsilateral side for left-handed signers).

See Chapter 5, for the revised terms suggested for these areas.

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of pronominal IX (Chapter 3) as well as for introduction and maintenance of various referential expressions (Chapter 4).