臺灣博碩士論文加值系統

In signed languages, the body can deliver rich messages. Signers often view themselves as the referents they are discussing and act like in the real-world situation. When a signer uses his/her body to describe a referent’s action in question, the use of body in linguistics has various names, for example, ‘body classifier’ (Supalla 1986), ‘constructed action’ (Metzger 1995; Aarons and Morgan 2003), or ‘full form pronoun’ (Kegl 2003). As for the function of the use of body, Perniss (2007) states that a signer is in ‘character perspective’ when he/she uses his/her body to narrate events.

In this thesis we use the body classifier which is categorized into non-projected body classifier and projected body classifier (cf. Kegl 2003). The former refers to the signer’s body as a pronoun affected by an action, while the latter refers to the projection of an invisible body affected by an action in the signing space. This thesis discusses body classifier in Taiwan Sign Language (TSL) and aims to explore the forms and the functions of the classifier. The first issue for discussion is about the verb forms of the verbal complement of the verb ‘help’ in TSL when describing the concept ‘someone helped someone else do something’.

The second issue is about the distributions of the projected body classifier. We explore in what condition the projected body classifier can occur and in what condition it can’t.

The third issue is to explore the functions of the projected body classifier. In other words, we figure out why the projected body classifier construction is preferred when the expression involves manner adverbials such as CAREFULLY, ANNOYINGLY, and LABORIOUSLY. Besides, we also focus on the recipient argument’s reaction so that we can examine whether the projected body classifier is preferred in that situation.

致謝辭…………………………………………………………………..……..i
ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………………..iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS…………...………………...…………….…………………v
Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………….1
1.1 Introduction………………………………………………………………..1
1.2 The main issues of the thesis…………………………………………4
1.3 Methods in eliciting data from informants……………………………9
1.4 The organization of the thesis…………………………………………10
Chapter 2 PREVIOUS DISCUSSIONS OF THE BODY IN SIGN LANGUAGES...11
2.1 Introduction………………………………………………………………11
2.2 Signer’s body corresponds to referent’s body..…………………………..11
2.3 Roles of the body………………………………………………………13
2.3.1 Body as subject……………………..……………………………14
2.3.2 Body as first person………………..……………………………15
2.3.3 The body part of human body………………..…………………..17
2.3.4 Summary………………….……………………………………....18
2.4 The signing space corresponds to non-first-person referent……………..18
2.5 Strategies in describing transitive events involving body actions……..19
2.5.1 AB verb constructions……………………………………………..19
2.5.2 The sub-events…………………………………………..………..20
2.5.3 Summary…………………………………………………………..21
2.6 Body classifiers in TSL…………………………………………………21
2.7 Concluding remarks……………………………………………………...23
Chapter 3 THE FORMS OF BODY CLASSIFIERS IN TSL….…….…….…...25
3.1 Introduction………………………………………………………………25
3.2 Non-projected form………………………………………………………26
3.3 Projected form………………………….……………………………..…34
3.4 The occurrence of the non-projected form and the projected form……40
3.4.1 Projected form precedes non-projected form…………….……...40
3.4.2 Non-projected form precedes projected form…………….……...47
3.4.3 Summary…………………………………………………………..54
3.5 Concluding remarks……………………………………………………...54

Chapter 4 THE FUNCTIONS OF BODY CLASSIFIERS IN TSL…….…..………..57
4.1 Introduction………………………………………………………………57
4.2 The prominence of the arguments………………………………………..58
4.2.1 Making the first argument prominent……………………………...58
4.2.2 Making the second argument prominent…………………………..66
4.2.3 Summary…………………………………………………………..72
4.3 Arguments with different messages in the same event…………………..72
4.4 Concluding remarks……………………………………………………...80
Chapter 5 CONCLUSION………………...…………………………………………82
REFERENCES……………………………………………………………………….85
Appendix: Handshapes in Taiwan Sign Language……………….…..………………89

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