Perspective in signed discourse: the privileged status of the signer’s locus and gaze

In gesture studies character viewpoint and observer viewpoint (McNeill 1992) characterize co-speech gestures depending on whether the gesturer’s hand and body imitate a referent’s hand and body or the hand represents a referent in its entirety. In sign languages, handling handshapes and entity handshapes are used in depicting predicates. Narratives in Danish Sign Language (DTS) elicited to make signers describe an event from either the agent’s or the patient’s perspective demonstrate that discourse perspective is expressed by which referent, the agent or the patient, the signers represent at their own locus. This is reflected in the orientation and movement direction of the manual articulator, not by the type of representation in the articulator. Signers may also imitate the gaze direction of the referent represented at their locus or have eye contact with the addressees. When they represent a referent by their own locus and simultaneously have eye contact with the addressee, the construction mixes referent perspective and narrator perspective. This description accords with an understanding of linguistic perspective as grounded in bodily perspective within a physical scene (Sweetser 2012) and relates the deictic and attitudinal means for expressing perspective in sign languages to the way perspective is expressed in spoken languages

Ny forskning i grammatik

Many Danish cognition verbs take both indicative and infinitive complements. We examine what the contrast between the two complement types codes. The literature offers two answers. One is that the contrast has to do with coreferentiality: if the cognition verb’s primary argument is coreferential with the primary argument of the complement, the complement tends to be infinitive; if not, the complement must be indicative. The other answer concerns the contrast between propositions and states-of-affairs: the indicative complement designates a proposition, the infinitive complement a state-of-affairs. Corpus studies support both answers. They also support an analysis of indicatives as proposition markers. But infinitives cannot – straightforwardly – be analysed as state-of-affairs markers

Kognitionsverber og kontrasten mellem indikativ- og infinitivkomplement

Many Danish cognition verbs take both indicative and infinitive complements. We examine what the contrast between the two complement types codes. The literature offers two answers. One is that the contrast has to do with coreferentiality: if the cognition verb’s primary argument is coreferential with the primary argument of the complement, the complement tends to be infinitive; if not, the complement must be indicative. The other answer concerns the contrast between propositions and states-of-affairs: the indicative complement designates a proposition, the infinitive complement a state-of-affairs. Corpus studies support both answers. They also support an analysis of indicatives as proposition markers. But infinitives cannot – straightforwardly – be analysed as state-of-affairs markers