Embodiment and discourse cohesion in five sign languages.

International audiencePersonal transfers (often called Constructed Actions or role shifts, Metzger 1995; Lillo-Martin 2012; Cormier, Smith & Sevcikova, in press) are very frequent structures in sign language discourse (Cuxac & Sallandre 2007). These structures involve the signer’s whole body to reproduce one or more actions carried out or sustained by an entity in the course of the utterance. The entities are usually human or animal but can also be inanimate. The movements of the signer’s body and face, the direction of eye gaze and facial expression represent those of the transferred entity. The handshape and orientation of the signer-narrator’s hands portray the basic form of an action (movement of the hand(s), e.g. grasping, walking). Furthermore, some of these structures can be combined together, for example when two entities are expressed simultaneously in a same structure (a double transfer in our terminology; multiple references in Dudis 2004).The present study uses data from five sign languages: French, Italian, Romanian, Flemish and Japanese sign languages (Cuxac et al 2002; Sallandre & L’Huillier 2011 ; Di Renzo 2015; Gavrilescu 2014; Daniel 2015; Van Herreweghe, Vermeerbergen et al 2015). Our corpora are made of narratives performed by five Deaf adults in each language (n=25 signers). The stories are based on the same stimuli (a picture story (the Horse) and Tom and Jerry cartoons), and are therefore fully comparable. These sign languages are all visuo-gestural languages used by Deaf people, but they share few or no historical links. Four of these share the European culture and Latin alphabet for fingerspelling, while Japanese Sign Language is not correlated and borrows other types of written rules. We hypothesized that the introduction of referents is done through different devices in this language, because of the very different lexical system, but that the re-introduction of referents is done through personal transfers, as the other sign languages do (Pizzuto et al 2008, for a first comparison on ASL, LSF and LIS). Our results showed that signers produced a wide range of personal transfers, averaging at 60% of the signs produced in each language, regardless of language. Animate entities in our stories (horse, cow, cat, mouse) were typically introduced by a lexical sign, but re-introduce through a personal transfer and/or a pointing gesture. Thus, the strategy of embodiment seems to be very productive in these visuo-gestural languages.This study, conducted on a few samples of sign productions, confirms the similarities between sign languages and the importance of personal transfers for discourse cohesion. The visuo-gestural modality seems to have an impact on the structure/organization of the discourse, particularly on how entities are expressed and embodied in such fully-fledged languages