5.4 The use of signing space
In the preceding chapters we have primarily considered the signs of a sign language. This chapter attempts to give an overview of the main organisational principles operating within signing space, and of locations that can be established in the space for identifying different sentence elements and semantic functions.
5.4.1 Time relationships
Dividing the signing space along the vertical plane near the signer’s ear and cheek into neutral, further forward, and further back areas (or locations) enables the signer to express time relationships such as present, future and past, respectively.5 These areas serve to indicate tense forms and can be used for forming time adverbs (Crystal 1987:222). A time adverb (or adverbial modification) is considered to be the most common way of showing tense or time relationships in sign languages, e.g. TOMORROW I COOK, YESTERDAY I COOK etc. in BSL (Kyle & Woll 1985:142). Signs such as FINISH in BSL and READY (FINISHED) in ESL can signify both past time as well as the completion which is implied in these signs, e.g. I EAT READY ‘I have had my meal.’ However, in addition to time adverbs, a number of signs which appear to inflect for tense in a way similar to English irregular verbs have been identified in BSL (i.e. suppletive verbs) (see Kyle & Woll 1985:143).
It should be noted that aspectual modulation, that is, whether an action is complete, habitual or continuous (aspect) is shown in all sign languages studied so far, but we will not concentrate on this in the present paper (for a detailed account, see Bergman 1982:17-19, Kyle & Woll 1985:144-150, about aspectual modulations on adjectival predicates, cf. Klima & Bellugi 1979).
5.4.2 The relationship between space and grammar
In addition to the use of points (or locations) in signing space designating time, a combination of conventionalised, relative and real locations is exploited to convey information about role. The notion of ‘role’, according to Kyle and Woll (1985:136), “involves both inflections for case (the description of subject, object, indirect object, etc.) and other devices by which the relationship between the participants mentioned in a sentence is made explicit.”
While using the real location a signer may point to, or otherwise indicate (e.g. by eye-gaze) objects, directions, locations (Kyle & Woll 1985:136). In relative locations, a signer establishes points in the signing space to create an image of some other location (Kyle and Woll 1985:136). For instance, while describing the interior of a house, the position and orientation of objects in the room will be indicated by locating them on a miniature ‘floor plan’ which is drawn in the space in front of the speaker (Kyle & Woll 1985:138). Locating itself is performed either by “producing the sign for the object and then pointing to the location on the ‘plan’, or by articulating the sign in the appropriate location” (Kyle & Woll 1985:138).
The third use of space is conventionalised location which, first of all, serves to distinguish sign pronouns or person reference points in different spatial areas. For example, the main person reference points of ESL, those for 1st, 2nd and 3rd person singular consist of the following positions in space: near or at the signer’s body: 1st person; in front-centre, i.e. away from the signer, in the direction of the addressee: 2nd person; one 3rd person is signed to the front-right, another to the front-left. These positions correspond to the pronouns for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd person singular, respectively.
Conventionalised locations, as pointed out by Kyle and Woll (1985:138), “can be overridden by real or relative locations where available.” However, once a sign designating a person or an object is placed in a certain position, this position is normally reserved for that sign for the remainder of the conversation. Thus the signer does not have to produce the same sign again, as it suffices to refer to it by pointing in the direction (indexing), or looking in that direction, where it was placed before (anaphoric reference).
Another use of conventionalised locations is with respect to verb inflections (BSL, ASL as well as other sign languages are considered to be highly inflected languages; see, for instance, Kyle & Woll 1985, Klima & Bellugi 1979). Verb behaviour for person and grammatical roles is defined according to conventional person reference points where the verb arguments are, or can be established, and thus mark pronominal (mainly anaphoric) and verb agreement (Pizzuto 1986:20) (the latter will be shortly discussed in Part II, 6.4).
On the whole, it has been observed
that the space around the signer’s body has different dimensions at each level of analysis, from phonological space (phonemically contrastive locations), morphological space (agreement morphology) to syntactic and discourse space (indexing and anaphora) (Padden 1990:131).