Abstract
In sign language ‘Role Shift’, the signer can adopt another person’s perspective to report a propositional attitude (‘Attitude Role Shift’) or an action (‘Action Role Shift’, often called ‘Constructed Action’); this is overtly marked by various means, such as a rotation of the signer’s body and/or eyegaze shift. This operation can be analyzed as an overt instantiation of the ‘monstrous’ mechanism of ‘context shift’ postulated for attitude reports in some spoken languages (Schlenker 2003, Anand & Nevins 2004, Anand 2006, Quer 2005). For Attitude Role Shift, we argue that this analysis brings new light to the typology of context-shifting operations: while some sign languages make it possible to ‘mix perspectives’ under Role Shift (Quer 2005), we argue that ASL and LSF obey the constraint that indexicals should ‘shift together’ (Anand 2006). Still, in ASL and LSF, data from Attitude Role Shift alone cannot fully exclude an alternative analysis based on quotation without context shift. By contrast, Action Role Shift, which has no established counterpart in spoken language, is not amenable to a quotational analysis because it is used to describe actions that don’t involve any speech- or thought-acts; in that respect, Role Shift is a ‘super monster’ that can shift the context outside of attitude reports. We develop a context-shifting analysis that applies both to Attitude and to Action Role Shift. (Important shortcomings of this analysis are discussed in Part II, which extends the theory with an ‘iconic component’ that addresses them.) EARLY ACCESS Supplementary Material (Appendix IV)
Highlights
On the basis of data from American and French Sign Language (ASL and LSF), we argue that this analysis brings new light to the typology of context-shifting operations: while some sign languages make it possible to ‘mix perspectives’ under Role Shift (Quer 2005, Herrmann & Steinbach 2012), we suggest that American Sign Language (ASL) and LSF obey Anand and Nevins’s constraint that indexicals should ‘shift together’
Our main LSF consultant does not seem to allow for wh-extraction out of a role-shifted clause. This might show (i) that these have a pure quotational semantics; or (ii) that they don’t have a quotational semantics, but that these role-shifted clauses are in a syntactic position from which material cannot be extracted; or (iii) that some other condition forces a quotational reading. (We will argue in Part II that the correct solution is (iii): the semantics of Role Shift involves context shift, but it has a quotational component that seems to be more rigid for our LSF consultant than for our ASL consultant.)
In brief: (i) in our data, it behaves in every respect like Attitude Role Shift, except that it requires more of a context to be licensed; (ii) this might suggest that quotation does allow for wh-extraction in ASL
Summary
Two strands of research on context-dependency have come together in recent years. In the semantics of spoken languages, considerable attention has been devoted to the phenomenon of context shift. The chief motivation lay in the behavior of indexicals While these were traditionally thought to depend rigidly on the context of the actual speech act, it turned out that there are languages and constructions in which this is not so: some attitude operators appear to be able to ‘shift the context of evaluation’ of some or all indexicals It may be used to report in a vivid way an individual’s actions ( ‘Action Role Shift’; a more traditional term in sign language research is ‘Constructed Action’). Action Role Shift, which has no established counterpart in spoken language, is not amenable to a quotational analysis because it is used to describe actions that don’t involve any speech- or thought-acts; in that respect, the context-shifting operations we find in sign language are ‘super monsters’ that can shift the context outside of attitude reports. In Part II, we will see that Role Shift is a ‘super monster’ not just in that it can shift the context outside of attitude reports, and in that it has an iconic and hyperintensional component.)
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