The in/visibleness of doing reference in a deaf signed language

The in/visibleness of doing reference in a deaf signed language Submitted for parallel presentation in BSL and English Research suggests signer’s choice of referring expression is primarily motivated by information management, i.e., lexicalised nouns and noun phrases are typically used to introduce new referents, whereas maintained and reintroduced referents are often indexed and/or depicted via pointing signs, indicating verbs, depicting signs and/or enactment (e.g. Morgan, 2006; Frederiksen & Mayberry, 2016). Signers may also create ‘invisible surrogates’, whereby a confluence of indexing actions enables interactants to conceptualize an entity as located in the signing space and behave as if it were present (Engberg-Pedersen, 1993; Liddell, 2003). For example, in Figure 1 an Auslan signer introduces agent frog into her retelling by: (a) fingerspelling and mouthing the English word “frog”; (b) signing the Auslan sign FROG while again mouthing the English word “frog”; (c) pointing with her right hand to an imagined frog located inside an imagined jar in front of her body, which she ‘holds’ by depicting this action with her left hand. In this way, the signer simultaneously depicts the visible actions of the boy holding the jar, while indexing the invisible frog and jar referents to the space in front of her body. However, the interaction of diverse in/visible semiotic strategies for doing reference, along with additional factors potentially influencing signer choices, have not yet been investigated using a signed language corpus. Using twenty retellings of Frog, Where Are You? and twenty retellings of The Boy Who Cried Wolf archived in the Auslan Corpus, we analysed 4,699 tokens of referring expressions with respect to: (a) the semiotic strategies used, (b) referent accessibility (introduced, maintained or reintroduced), and (c) animacy (humans, animals or inanimate objects). Exploratory analysis using hierarchical clustering on principal components confirmed choice of strategy was most strongly motivated by accessibility: new referents were expressed with more conventionalised forms (especially English mouthing and lexicalised Auslan signs), whereas maintained and reintroduced referents typically involved fewer and less conventionalised semiotics. However, animacy was also a motivating factor. In particular, signers used enactment and invisible surrogates differently depending on whether the referent was human, animal or inanimate object. We describe these patterns and suggest they may be explained by discourse topicality and signer preferences for embodying specific referents. These findings demonstrate the ‘pretend world’ indexicality of signed language use and the pluralistic complexity of face-to-face communication. Figure 1 Introducing ‘frog’ (Auslan Corpus, PCNB2c7a_CLU#004)