Contribution of the Semiological Approach to Deixis-Anaphora in Sign Language: The Key Role of Eye-Gaze.

Brigitte Garcia,Marie-Anne Sallandre

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.583763

Abstract

We address the issue of deixis–anaphora in sign language (SL) discourse, focusing on the role of eye-gaze. According to the Semiological Approach, SL structuring stems from a maximum exploitation of the visuo-gestural modality, which results in two modes of meaning production, depending on the signer’s semiotic intent. Involving both non-manual and manual parameters, the first mode, expressing the intent to say while showing, uses constructions based on structures, the termed “transfer structures.” The second one, expressing the intent to say without showing, involves lexical, pointing and fingerspelling units. In order to situate our descriptive concepts with respect to those used by SL linguists who, like us, adopt a cognitive–functionalist perspective, we expose a specific theoretical foundation of our approach, the “enunciation theories.” The concept of “enunciation” is decisive for understanding the role of eye-gaze, as being at the foundation of deixis and the key vector of referential creation and tracking in SL discourse. “Enunciation” entails the opposition between “Enunciation” and “Utterance” Domains. The first links, as co-enunciators, the signer/speaker and his/her addressee, establishing them by the very “act of enunciation” as 1st and 2nd person. The second is internal to the discourse produced. Grounding on corpora of narratives in several SLs (some with no historical link), we illustrate this crucial role of eye-gaze and the diversity of functions it fulfills. Our analyses, carried out in this perspective, attest to the multiple structural similarities between SLs, particularly with regard to transfer structures. This result strongly supports the typological hypothesis underlying our approach, namely, that these structures are common to all SLs. We thus show that an enunciative analysis, based on the key role of eye-gaze in these visual languages that are SLs, is able to give the simplest account of their own linguistic economy and, in particular, of deixis–anaphora in these languages.

Highlights

Following Apothéloz and Pekarek Doehler (2003, 110), reference can be defined as “the relationship that language maintains with its external environment”, and the action of referring as drawing attention to an entity—of which the deixis is the vector par excellence
Liddell goes further: he assimilates sign language (SL) pointing signs to ostensive pointing gestures that can be found in spoken language (SpL) coverbal gesturing
If we want to be able to compare crosslinguistic data on an equal basis to determine how reference operates in SL discourse, it seems to us urgent that SL linguists come to an agreement on how to segment sequences

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Following Apothéloz and Pekarek Doehler (2003, 110), reference can be defined as “the relationship that language maintains with its external environment (whether it is called ‘mental representation,’ ‘world,’ or ‘reality’)”, and the action of referring as drawing attention to an entity—of which the deixis is the vector par excellence. As shown below, highly iconic constructions have been at the heart of the Semiological Approach from its inception, where they were described early on as part of the set known as Transfer Structures (Cuxac, 1985, 1999) They have been shown to play a central role in doing reference and for referential cohesion, in LSF (Cuxac, 1999, 2000; Sallandre, 2003; Jacob, 2007; Garcia and Sallandre, 2014), in LIS (Pizzuto, 2007), and in other SLs, considered from a comparative typological perspective (Pizzuto et al, 2008; Sallandre, 2014; Sallandre et al, 2016). This is why, we insist once again, in order to properly analyze the function that the gaze fulfils at a given point, a sufficiently broad part of the discourse must be taken into account

CONCLUSION

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

Findings

ETHICS STATEMENT