Vadim Kimmelman

May 2008

Sketch of Anaphora in RSL in comparison with ASL[1]

1.Introduction

Russian Sign Language (RSL) is the language of the Deaf in Russia. American Sign Language (ASL) is the language of the Deaf in America. They are historically related, because they have the common ancestor – Old French Sign Language.

In RSL I’ve managed to find 4 types of pronouns: personal pronouns which are really pointing signs (both personal and possessive), reflexive pronouns (both personal and possessive), reciprocal pronoun and a “logophoric” 1st-person pronoun.In my sketch I’m going to outline main properties of these pronouns.

Unfortunately, I was not able to check c-command condition for RSL, because RSL-informants are usually insensitive to the word order changes, and the structure of the RSL-sentence is still unexplored.

2.Reflexives

In RSL there are personal reflexive pronoun SELF (see picture 1[2]) and 2 possessive reflexives, further glossed as SVOJ[3] (see picture 2,3).

Picture 1Sign SELF (RSL).

Picture 2 Sign SVOJ version 1 (RSL).

Picture 3 Sign SVOJ version 2 (RSL).

They have the following properties:

  • They represent bound variables:

(1)BOY SEE SELF ON-PHOTO, GIRL TOO

‘The boy saw himself on the picture and the girl too’=

The boy saw himself on the picture and the girl saw herself on the picture (sloppy reading).

#The boy1 saw himself on the picture and the girl saw him1 on the picture (strict reading).

(2)BOY SEE SVOJ ON-PHOTO, GIRL TOO

‘The boy1saw his1picture, and the girl too’=

The boy1 saw his1 picture, and the girl2 saw her2 picture(sloppy reading).

#The boy1 saw his1 picture, and the girl2 saw his1 picture (strict reading).

(3)BOYS ALL SEE SELF PHOTO

‘All the boys saw themselves on the photo’

  • They are subject-oriented:

(4)BOY SHOW GIRL SELF ON-PHOTO

‘The boy showed the girl himself/*herself on the picture’

  • I don’t actually know whether they can be used long-distantly:

(5)GIRL WANT START TELL SELF

‘The girl wants to start telling about herself’

Not all the predicates allow long-distance reflexives:

(6)GIRL KNOW THAT SEE SVOJ PHOTO

‘The girl1 knows that she saw her1 photo’

This fact can mean that the sign THAT is a blocking factor, but since we don’t know the structure of a sentence in RSL I can’t propose anything more specifically here.So the questions of the binding domain and long-distance remainunsolved.

3. Reciprocals

In RSL there is a reciprocal pronoun, further REC (see picture 4).

Picture 4 Sign REC (RSL).

It has the following properties:

  • It can get only bound reading:

(7)BOYS SEE REC ON-PHOTO, GIRL TOO

‘The boys saw each other on the picture and the girls too’=

The boys saw each other on the picture and the girls saw each other on the picture (sloppy reading).

#The boys1 saw each other on the picture and the girls saw them1 on the picture (strict reading).

  • They are subject-oriented (compare the Russian and English examples):

(8)BOYS SHOW GIRLSREC ON-PHOTO

‘The boys1 showed the girls2each other1/*2 on the picture’

(9)Malčikipokazalidevočkamdrug druga na forografii

boysshowedgirlseach other on picture

‘The boys1 showed the girls2each other1/2 on the picture’

  • No other information is available.

4.Personal pronouns

Sandler&Lillo-Martin 2004 (among others) describe the unique property of sign languages: personal pronouns in most observed sign languages are really pointing signs. Therefore, using pronouns does notproduce an ambiguity, as it does in Russian or English. Compare the following examples from English and ASL:

English

(10)The governoritold the senatorj that theyi+j/k/i+k/j+k should leave

ASL

(11)a-GOVERNOR TELL-bb-SENATOR c-IX SHOULD c-LEAVE

‘The governori told the senatorj that theyk should leave’

(12)a-GOVERNOR TELL-b b-SENATOR b:c-IX SHOULD b:c-LEAVE

‘The governori told the senatorj that theyj+k should leave’

(13)a-GOVERNOR TELL-b b-SENATOR a:b-IX SHOULD a:b-LEAVE

‘The governori told the senatorj that theyi+j should leave’

[Slightly simplified from Sandler&Lillo-Martin 2006: 375-376]

“Thus, for ASL, unlike for spoken languages, the referential indices can be overtly realized, in the form of distinct locations in signing space” [Sandler&Lillo-Martin 2006:378]. Nouns also can be realized in particular locations.

Personal pronouns have some properties unrelated to anaphora theory but interesting by themselves:

  • They show marking for number (both in ASL and RSL).
  • They show first person vs. non-first person distinction (both in ASL and RSL): first person pronoun is invariable and can be listed in the lexicon, while non-first person pronoun is an unlimited set of pointing signs.

Consider the pictures of 1st person pronoun (further I), non-1st person pronoun (further HE, though there is no gender distinction), possessive 1st person pronoun (further MY) and possessive non-1st person pronoun (further HIS, though there is no gender distinction):

Picture 5 Sign I (RSL). Picture 6 Sign MY (RSL).

Picture 7 Sign HE (RSL). Picture 8 Sign HIS (RSL).

Personal and possessive pronouns in RSL have the following properties:

  • They are not pronouns in Chomskian (Chomsky 1981) sense: they can be used in co-argument position with the antecedent:

(14)BOY_1[4] SAW HE_1 ON-PHOTO

‘The boy saw himself on the picture’

They can’t be used if noun is not assigned a location, because the mechanism of showing the coreference is using a personal pronoun pointing to the location assigned to the antecedent noun.

  • Used in this position, a pronoun can get bound or unbound readings:

(15)BOY_1 SEE HE_1 ON-PHOTO, GIRL_2 TOO

‘The boy saw himself on the picture and the girl too’=

The boy saw himself on the picture and the girl saw herself on the picture (sloppy reading).

The boy1 saw himself on the picture and the girl saw him1 on the picture (strict reading).

(16)BOYS ALL_1 SEE HE_1 PHOTO

‘All the boys saw themselves on the photo’

  • To get strict reading only one should add another pronoun after the sign TOO:

(17)BOY_1 SEE HE_1 ON-PHOTO, GIRL_2 TOO HE_1

‘The boy saw himself on the picture and the girl saw him too’.

  • Naturally, they are not subject-oriented, becausethey are just pointing gestures:

(18)BOY_1 SHOW GIRL_2HE_2 ON-PHOTO

‘The boy showed the girl herself on the picture’

  • Unfortunately, I have no information whether they can be used long-distantly.

5. “Logophor”

The first person pronoun in RSL can be used as a reflexive. Actually, we can call it reflexive, but then we should explain why first person pronoun coincide with one of the reflexive pronouns. Lillo-Martin 1995 called a similar pronoun in ASL logophoric (see further), so I use this term here too.

Consider the following example:

(19)BOY SEE I ON-PHOTO

‘Boy saw himself on the picture’

Unfortunately, I have no data about strict vs. sloppy-readings of this pronoun and about its binding domain.

This pronoun in RSL has the following properties:

  • It is subject-oriented

(20)BOY SHOW GIRL I ON-PHOTO

‘The boy showed the girl himself/*herself on the picture

  • It can be used long-distantly:

(21)GIRL WANT HE LOVE I

‘The girl wants the boy to love her’

  • Actually, I have no right to call this pronoun “logophoric”, because I don’t know whether it is used only with speech or perception verbs. May be it is more plausible to call it “first person reflexive”.

Lillo-Martin 1995 proposed that in ASL first person pronoun can be used as a logophoric pronoun. To explain its properties she invented a point-of-view predicate. She proved the existence of this predicate using binding domains and sloppy-strict reading test, but since I haven’t made the tests, I won’t get deeper into her analysis. This pronoun is unarguably interesting for future research.

References:

Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding: The Pisa Lectures.Dordrecht: Foris.

Lillo-Martin D. (1995) The point of view predicate in American Sign Language. In Language, Gesture, and Space, eds. Karen Emmorey and Judy Reilly, 155-170. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Sandler W. & Lillo-Martin D. (2006) Sign language and linguistic universals. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press

1

[1]I’m grateful to V.P. Kamneva for her help in organizing the work with informant. Thanks to Barbara Partee for her comments on this paper. This paper was made as a project for the course “Formal Semantics and Anaphora”, RussianStateUniversity for the Humanities (spring semester, 2008).

[2]My informant didn’t allow me to use her pictures, so I’ve tried to copy her signs myself.

[3]I don’t have any information about differences between these signs.

[4]_1 here means that the sign is made in some location here names 1. Personal pronoun is pointing to the same location.