A ‘point’ of inquiry: The case of the (non-)pronominal IX in ASL

Abstract

It has been claimed that in American Sign Language (ASL), the sign glossed as IX is used for a variety of functions, including personal pronouns, locatives, and determiners (Meier and Lillo-Martin 2013). We propose to unify these disparate functions by analyzing IX as a demonstrative, appearing with or without an overt complement. Appealingly simple, this move accounts for a wide range of facts regarding the distribution and interpretation of IX. We focus on points to third-person referents. Such points are directed toward loci -real people, objects, or locations in the physical space around the signer, or places (possibly arbitrarily) associated with their referents in the signed discourse (Lillo-Martin and Klima 1990). The loci themselves raise considerable interesting issues (Barberà 2012, Gagne and Davidson 2014); however, their contribution is often conflated with the contribution of IX alone. Thus, we specifically ask: for a sign involving pointing, what is the nature of IX (i.e. the lexical item realized in a pointing hand-shape) when dissociated from the issue of locus (i.e. the space where it points to)?1 We will use the following conventions for notation. Signs are glossed in upper case words that are their closest translation equivalents; '#' indicates that the lexical item that follows is fingerspelled. Lower-case letters appended to sign glosses refer to spatial loci; the letters do not stand for particular locations in space (which are often arbitrarily assigned), except for 'neu' (neutral space) -an area in front of the signer with no assigned locus. IX followed by a word in parentheses indicates that the point was directed at the object named, e.g. IX(phone). A line above glosses indicates non-manual marking; 't' stands for topic marking and 'wh' for wh-question marking. Somewhat unconventionally (but replicating the relevant source), we use 'CL IX' for a two-handed construction involving a '1'-classifier signed with a non-dominant hand and IX with the dominant one.

Pronoun production and comprehension in American Sign Language: the interaction of space, grammar, and semantics

“…Much research has focused on the use of space in the resolution of signed pronouns. This is true in formal theoretical linguistics (Koulidobrova & Lillo-Martin, 2016;Kuhn, 2016;MacLaughlin, 1997;Neidle et al, 2000;Schlenker, 2011Schlenker, , 2013Steinbach & Onea, 2016) and in experimental psycholinguistics (Emmorey, 1997;Emmorey & Lillo-Martin, 1995;Emmorey et al, 1991;Wienholz et al, 2018). The referential transparency of ASL pronouns suggests that they may be different from pronouns in spoken languages.…”

Reference tracking in early stages of different modality L2 acquisition: Limited over-explicitness in novice ASL signers’ referring expressions

“…ASL uses pointing signs to refer to people and objects (Friedman, 1975;McBurney, 2002). These pointing signs have traditionally been considered pronouns (Sandler and Lillo-Martin, 2006), although recent work has highlighted problems with this (Schlenker, 2013(Schlenker, , 2017 and proposed that they are in fact not pronouns proper, but rather demonstratives (Koulidobrova and Lillo-Martin, 2016). Regardless of their theoretical status, pointing signs can be used with many of the same discourse functions as pronouns so, for the purposes of this article, we will refer to them as pronouns or pronominal points.…”

“…P-A-R-K). Nouns sometimes occur in combination with points in signing space, which under some analyses of ASL have been treated as definite noun phrases or noun phrases with locative adverbials (MacLaughlin, 1997; Neidle et al, 2000; Zimmer and Patschke, 1990; but for a counterargument, see Koulidobrova and Lillo-Martin, 2016). Others have treated ASL as lacking determiners (Koulidobrova, 2012), and it seems that bare nouns are preferred in ASL narratives (Swabey, 2002), such that signers simply use context to determine where a referent belongs on the hierarchy of givenness or accessibility (Ariel, 1988; Gundel et al, 1993).…”

Pointing in gesture and sign

“…;Koulidobrova and Lillo-Martin 2016;McBurney 2002). Still others argue that the person-and number-marking features seen in some sign language's personreferring points justifies treating them not only as linguistic, but as clear pronouns (see discussion inCormier, Schembri, and Woll 2013).…”

“…Such treatments focus instead on identifying similarities and differences between pointing signs and pronouns or demonstratives on the one hand, and pointing signs and pointing gestures on the other (see discussions in Cormier, Schembri, and Woll 2013; Johnston 2013a, 2013b); or on the cognitive processes that account for how speakers and signers use points (see discussion inWilcox and Occhino, 2016).Of course, signers point not only toward people in the world around them, but also toward objects and locations. Pointing signs targeting objects have been described as demonstrative expressions(Koulidobrova and Lillo-Martin 2016;McBurney 2004), while pointing signs targeting locations have been called 'locatives' (e.g.,de Vos 2013;Padden 1983;…”