Looking at Viewpoint in ASL Through a Cognitive Linguistics Lens.

Abstract

Central to how signed languages such as American Sign Language (ASL) express the viewpoint of a signer is the space surrounding the signer's body, and primarily that in front of the signer. Perspective-taking, in its most basic form, is physical and perceptual in nature, where signers might map a scene experienced in the past onto their present surrounding space as they engage in narrative discourse. But beyond this, signers also express conceptual viewpoint in terms of how they view, subjectively, more abstract ideas, for example expressing a particular stance toward someone's actions, and space frequently plays a role here too. The expression of viewpoint affects linguistic structure in a variety of ways, for example, when the perspective shifts from one story character to another, referring to various entities must be tracked, for which ASL has particular linguistic mechanisms that signers employ. At an abstract level, ASL has certain constructions that reflect viewpoint, one example of which is topic-comment constructions, where a topic phrase is subjectively chosen (often paradigmatically) as a means of framing a state of affairs, which is one kind of conceptual viewpoint, whereas the comment that follows is a construction containing, pragmatically, the signer's belief or stance regarding that state of affairs. Through a cognitive linguistics lens, we can see how aspects of viewpoint in ASL involve instances of conceptual blends, relying on metaphor and metonymy, body partitioning, and image schemas.