1887
Volume 13, Issue 2
  • ISSN 1568-1475
  • E-ISSN: 1569-9773
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Abstract

Co-speech pointing actions have been under-analysed or ignored in language description and linguistic theory and this has led to an over-interpretation of their role and status in signed languages as signs belonging to particular grammatical classes, such as pronouns, determiners, and locatives. I argue that the pointing signs found in signed languages are not fundamentally different from the pointing actions found in the composite utterances of spoken languages in their face-to-face mode. I show how pointing signs and pointing actions are both symbolic indexical signs (signs that have partly conventional elements and partly contextual elements and are thus hybrids of conventional and non-conventional signs). I conclude that pointing signs are not a fundamentally different kind of phenomena when they occur in signed language composite utterances (so-called ‘linguistic’ pointing) compared to when they occur in spoken language composite utterances (so-called ‘gestural’ pointing).

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/content/journals/10.1075/gest.13.2.01joh
2013-01-01
2025-02-18
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): deixis; gesture; pointing; pronouns; semiotics; sign language; symbolic indexical
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