Reference switching in sign and speech: grammatical and discourse features across modalities within signed-to-spoken language interpretation

Abstract

Human languages contain a variety of tools for referencing agents, locations, arguments of predicates, and other entities that are introduced, described, and attributed actions within sentences. While there are similarities across modalities, there also exist notable differences. For example, signed languages are articulated with two hands, and sometimes one of them serves referencing functions while the other produces complementary signs. Additionally, signers use role shift and constructed action extensively, whereas there is comparatively less use of reported speech and co-speech enactment in spoken language discourse. Differences across modalities such as these provide areas of focus for studies of interpretation, since a common theoretical premise is that interpreters should disengage from the form of a source-language message in order to provide the meaning in the target language (with its own form). It is open to debate whether an interpretation can achieve complete semantic equivalence, given differences in the grammars, lexical items, and discourse features of the source- and target-languages. We use Libras texts interpreted into Brazilian Portuguese to examine various types of referencing in language and how it occurs in such texts. Our analysis is intended to raise questions about referencing and interpretation that merit in-depth study.

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Original in English.