Conflation of spatial reference frames in deaf community sign languages

Abstract

Abstract Linguistic spatial descriptions are not purely arbitrary, but are to some extent motivated by many interactive factors. For example, whether the language community is predominantly urban or rural may motivate its reliance on relative or absolute reference frame (Dasen and Mishra 2010; Pederson 1993, 2006). This review paper contributes to Sociotopography in two ways: first, by showing that the distribution of reference frames reported in the literature corresponds to deaf community sign languages and village sign languages (thus the urban-rural differences generalize across modalities), and second, that deaf community sign languages all allow their users to employ a conflated intrinsic-relative frame, which is possibly due to affordances of the visual-manual modality (a modality-specific feature). Comparing the visual-manual and the aural-oral modalities therefore shows that some variation in spatial descriptions correlates with the environment regardless of the modality used, but also highlights modality-specific properties.