Impersonal human reference in French Sign Language (LSF)

Abstract

The present paper offers a first systematic approach to the expression of impersonal human reference in French Sign Language (LSF). It extends and deepens a prior study carried out by the authors on the basis of a large scale discourse corpus. The description proposed here is based primarily on data elicited through a specialised questionnaire on impersonal human reference (Barberà & Cabredo Hofherr, this volume), initially developed for spoken languages and adapted for sign languages. The strategies revealed are compared with those discussed in our prior study. We begin with a brief review of the literature on impersonal human reference in spoken and sign languages, and a presentation of our theoretical framework for the analysis of LSF. We then elaborate on our methodology and the issues raised by the elicitation protocol adopted, from initial stages of its preparation to the representation of our data. We finally present and discuss the main strategies we highlighted for the expression of impersonal reference in LSF.