Abstract
While sign language ‘Role Shift’ can be analyzed as an overt instance of context shift, we argue that it has two broad properties that require a special treatment. First, Role Shift used to report attitudes (‘Attitude Role Shift’) has a quotational component which does not follow from a simple context-shifting analysis. Second, Role Shift used to report actions (‘Action Role Shift’) has a strong iconic component: properties of signs that can be assigned to the reported situation (e.g. a happy face) must be so interpreted. We argue that both varieties of Role Shift should be analyzed as context shift, but with an important addition: the expressions that appear under Role Shift should be interpreted maximally iconically, i.e. so as to maximize the possibilities of projection between the signs used and the situation they make reference to (Role Shift is thus a ‘super monster’ not just in that it can shift the context outside of attitude reports, as was argued in Part I, but also in that it has an iconic and thus hyperintensional component). This accounts both for the quotational character of Attitude Role Shift (in this case, maximal iconicity reduces to quotation), and for the fact that Action Role Shift has a strong iconic component. Finally, this analysis vindicates the view that some expressions may be simultaneously used and mentioned/demonstrated, as argued for instance in Recanati 2001. EARLY ACCESS Supplementary Material (Appendix IV)
Highlights
Role Shift in sign language can be taken to be an overt instance of context shift, as argued in Quer 2005
In Part I of the present piece, we suggested that two varieties of Role Shift should be distinguished: Attitude Role Shift resembles context-shifting phenomena that have been described in indirect discourse in some spoken languages, and we arguably find the same typology of context-shifting operations within the signed and spoken modalities
We conclude that in ASL and LSF Attitude Role Shift, if an elided VP appears in the role-shifted clause it cannot be licensed from outside that clause, and it is understood to be quoted from the situation which is reported
Summary
What do we mean by ‘iconic effects’? To see an intuitively clear example, consider the verb GROW in (32), which can be realized in a variety of ways, six of which were tested in (33). The key to that enrichment is a condition simc,w(grow’, GROWk, g) which requires that in the situation of evaluation w, a similarity relation given by the context c should hold between the property of growing as applied to g and the iconically interpreted sign GROWk.. The final effect is to ensure that the particular realization of the sign GROW provides information about the amount and speed of the growth — as is desired It remains to say under what conditions a sentence is true. In at least some cases iconic enrichments are at-issue, and can take scope under logical operators This is shown by the ASL example in (40)-(41), where iconic size and speed modifications enrich the meaning of GROW within the scope of the if -clause. As well as for reasons of simplicity, we will mostly treat iconic enrichments as being at-issue (but see Schlenker et al 2013 and Schlenker 2014 for iconic contributions that are presuppositional when they pertain to the denotation of loci)
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