Variations lexicales et invariants structuraux dans des récits de sept langues des signes

Personal transfers, which are often called in literature constructed actions or role shifts (Metzger 1995, Cormier, Smith & Sevcikova, 2015) are very useful and frequent structures in discourse cohesion (Cuxac 1985, 2000, Cuxac & Sallandre 2007, Sallandre & Garcia 2013). Personal transfers involve the signer’s whole body to reproduce one or more actions carried out or sustained by an entity in the course of the utterance. The entities are usually human or animal but can also be inanimate. The movements of the signer’s body and face, the direction of eye gaze and facial expression represent those of the transferred entity. The handshape and orientation of the signer-narrator’s hands portray the basic form of an action (movement of the hand(s), e.g. grasping, walking, etc.). Some of these structures can be combined together in a simultaneous manner. For example when two entities are expressed simultaneously in a same structure, it results a double transfer (called multiple references in Dudis 2004). This research uses data from seven sign languages: French, Italian, Flemish, German, Chilean, Brazilian and South African SL. Data were collected by our respective research groups or by colleagues in different areas of the world (Cuxac et al 2002, Boutet, Sallandre & Fusellier-Souza 2010, Lattapiat 2008, Pettita, Sallandre & Rossini 2013, Di Renzo 2015, Van Herreveghe et al 2015). Our corpora are made of narratives performed by five Deaf adults in each sign language: the stories are fully comparable because they are narratives based on a picture story (the Horse). We annotated the data with the same ELAN template in order to make a real comparison of the constructions involved in each language. These languages have a few or no historical links but they share the propriety to be visuo-gestural modality languages of Deaf people. We made the hypothesis that the modality has an impact on how the discourse is build, particularly on how the entities are expressed. In the visuo-gestural modality, iconicity plays an important role, particularly to introduce and re-introduce animate entities. Our results showed that all the signers in our data produced personal transfers, with an average of 60% of the signs. More interestingly, they produced not only simple personal transfers but also three other types of personal transfers: double transfer; semi-personal transfer (a lexical sign expresses the action of the entity during a personal transfer); and personal transfer with reported speech. This study, conducted on a few sample of sign productions in seven sign languages tends to confirm the similarities between sign languages and the importance of personal transfers in discourse cohesion. These transfers, simple or in combination, seem to be an important root of sign languages of the world and deserve the attention of the linguists. To complete these results, further researches must be conducted on a larger population in each country and in various genres.