Indicating verbs in British Sign Language favour motivated use of space

Sign languages have traditionally been described as having a distinction between (1) arbitrary (referential or syntactic) space, considered to be a purely grammatical use of space in which locations arbitrarily represent concrete or abstract subject and/or object arguments using pronouns or indicating verbs, for example, and (2) motivated (topographic or surrogate) space, involving real-world mapping of locations of concrete referents onto the signing space via classifier constructions. Some linguists have suggested that it may be misleading to see the two uses of space as being completely distinct from one another. In this study, we use conversational data from the British Sign Language Corpus (www.bslcorpusproject.org) to look at the use of space with modified indicating verbs – specifically the directions in which these verbs are used as well as the co-occurrence of eyegaze shifts and constructed action. Our findings suggest that indicating verbs are frequently produced in conditions that use space in a motivated way and are rarely modified using arbitrary space. This contrasts with previous claims that indicating verbs in BSL prototypically use arbitrary space. We discuss the implications of this for theories about grammaticalisation and the role of gesture in sign languages and for sign language teaching

On verb ‘agreement’ in sign languages: Indicating verbs as typologically unique constructions

In this paper, we present arguments for an analysis of indicating verbs, building on Liddell (2000), as a typologically unique, unimodal fusion of signs and pointing gestures used for reference tracking. This contrasts with many formalist analyses that assume that directionality in indicating verbs constitutes an agreement marking system. While exploring some of the debate in the literature about these forms, we propose a model of indicating verbs within a Construction Grammar framework that compares them to multimodal constructions in spoken languages. We explain how our model of indicating verbs appear to align with a growing body of research on co-speech gesture and is supported by some recent findings about these verbs from corpus-based studies of sign languages

Sign language phonology

Sign language phonology is the abstract grammatical component where primitive structural units are combined to create an infinite number of meaningful utterances. Although the notion of phonology is traditionally based on sound systems, phonology also includes the equivalent component of the grammar in sign languages, because it is tied to the grammatical organization, and not to particular content. This definition of phonology helps us see that the term covers all phenomena organized by constituents such as the syllable, the phonological word, and the higher-level prosodic units, as well as the structural primitives such as features, timing units, and autosegmental tiers, and it does not matter if the content is vocal or manual. Therefore, the units of sign language phonology and their phonotactics provide opportunities to observe the interaction between phonology and other components of the grammar in a different communication channel, or modality. This comparison allows us to better understand how the modality of a language influences its phonological system