On categorizing types of role shift in sign languages

Abstract

Role shift is the widespread phenomenon in sign languages whereby a signer reports utterances, thoughts or actions of a character in another context by resorting to a possibly very rich array of nonmanual markers that imitatively depict the agent in that context. Such markers can include changes in eye gaze direction, facial expression, head and body position, and are mostly articulated simultaneously with manual signing. The stretches of signing marked with such nonmanual cues are interpreted by default with displaced reference to the derived context being reported. The literature that has undertaken a formal analysis of role shift has mostly focused on its use as a means to encode reported discourse, and it has addressed the question whether role shift is marking a direct quotation only or it encodes indirect reports as well. In this line of work, its use to report someone else’s actions has been often put aside, despite the fact that in spontaneous discourse both uses occur intertwined with one another.