Intersubjective modulation of exophoric demonstratives in ASL

Abstract Demonstratives are essential for coordinating joint attention during discourse. In contrast to spoken languages that typically distribute the work of establishing and maintaining joint attention across two or more demonstratives such as this and that in English, American Sign Language (ASL) does not have contrasting forms. ASL relies almost exclusively on pointing signs for the grammatical functions of demonstratives. This study investigates whether exophoric demonstrative points are modulated with nonmanual markers (NMMs) in response to different contexts of use. 455 demonstrative points were elicited in a puzzle completion task completed by ten ASL signers. Conditional inference trees were used to evaluate the effects of distance, intersubjective alignment and referent specificity on the NMMs produced with the demonstrative points. The results indicate that signers signal increasing distance from their body with an arc movement of the hand, as well as head and body leans, whereas NMMs on the face were associated with intersubjective functions. Contrary to our hypotheses, we found no NMMs associated with the need for greater specificity of demonstrative points when multiple potential referents were in the field of view.