An Exploratory Study of ASL Demonstratives

Jill P. Morford,Naomi Shin,Paul Twitchell,Barbara Shaffer,Bettie T. Petersen

doi:10.3390/languages4040080

Abstract

American Sign Language (ASL) makes extensive use of pointing signs, but there has been only limited documentation of how pointing signs are used for demonstrative functions. We elicited demonstratives from four adult Deaf signers of ASL in a puzzle completion task. Our preliminary analysis of the demonstratives produced by these signers supports three important conclusions in need of further investigation. First, despite descriptions of four demonstrative signs in the literature, participants expressed demonstrative function 95% of the time through pointing signs. Second, proximal and distal demonstrative referents were not distinguished categorically on the basis of different demonstrative signs, nor on the basis of pointing handshape or trajectory. Third, non-manual features including eye gaze and facial markers were essential to assigning meaning to demonstratives. Our results identify new avenues for investigation of demonstratives in ASL.

Highlights

We know very little about the demonstrative system in American Sign Language (ASL), or any other signed language for that matter
According to Hoffmeister (1978), who completed a longitudinal study of two deaf children of deaf parents acquiring ASL, the demonstrative function is carried by pointing signs
We found two of the four demonstrative forms using the sign glossed THAT identified by Baker-Shenk and Cokely (1980), but these forms were much less likely to be produced than a pointing sign

Summary

Introduction

We know very little about the demonstrative system in American Sign Language (ASL), or any other signed language for that matter. Several groups of investigators have examined pointing signs in signed languages more closely, and even compared them to co-speech pointing by hearing speakers (Coppola and Senghas 2010; Cormier et al 2013; Fenlon et al 2019; Meier and Lillo-Martin 2013; Perniss and Özyürek 2015). These investigators find that pointing in both signed and spoken languages is very common, and is often used to direct attention, specify referents, locations and directions, and to indicate verb arguments. While there is extensive description and analysis of pointing signs, and of the use of points as personal pronouns in ASL, the literature on demonstratives in ASL and other signed languages is strikingly sparse

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Results

Conclusion