Right dislocated pronominals in Hong Kong Sign Language

Abstract

In several sign languages, it is observed that sometimes a nominal expression appears twice within the same sentence, once in its regular syntactic position and once sentence-finally as a pronominal pointing sign. This paper investigates how these sentence-final pronouns are used in Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL), which is the natural sign language used by the Deaf community in Hong Kong. Previous studies of sentence-final pronouns in sign languages put forward three major accounts: these pronouns serve as focus/emphasis markers, agreement markers, and right dislocations. On the basis of elicited and spontaneous discourse data collected from deaf native signers, this paper argues that sentence-final pronouns in HKSL are right dislocated ‘aboutness’ topics. Given that pronouns in HKSL, as in other sign languages, are directed towards the locations associated with the intended referents, sentence-final pronouns can help secure the attention of the addressee towards the topics in discourse by upholding their visual prominence via spatial indexing. This strategy is most commonly used in conversational interactions.