Betreff: Quotatives

[Dan Parvaz]

>May I suggest chapter 5 of my book, Grammar, Gesture, and Meaning in
>American Sign Language?

You may -- and I'll certainly take it to heart. I read at least one earlier paper by you on the subject, but I need to look at your latest take.

To Alysse: Don was right about what I was looking at, and I got a private referral to an MA thesis which looks at this from a formal-syntactic point of view. It's moments like this that I love this list.

I'm thinking about the gamut of things signers do... from shifting spaces to assume roles all the way to completely dropping themselves in the narrative and "becoming" one or more of the actors. So, shifts in perspective, out-and-out mime (you know, where transcibers throw up their hands and just put a description of the action between quotation marks) look like a superset of what linguists working in spoken languages call quotatives. The data may defy traditional analysis, but it's certainly a part of what native signers do.

Cheers,

Dan.