The Embodiment of Intersubjectivity, Otherness and Absence in Signed Language Narratives

Abstract

Along with conversation, narrative is one of the leading candidates for a universal genre of language use. It is the site of at least two layers of intersubjectivity: that at which the narrator interacts with the narratee and that at which subjects within the narrative interact among themselves. In written narratives the first layer of intersubjectivity is transformed through the medium of writing into two virtual subjectivities – that of the writer with her imagined reader in an initial enunciative act and that of the reader with her imagined writer in a subsequent enunciative act displaced in time and space. In oral or signed narratives, this first layer of intersubjectivity is necessarily embodied in the face-to-face presence of the participants in the enunciative act. In oral languages, within this initial, embodied, physically grounded enunciative setting, the second layer of virtual narrative intersubjectivity is constructed through the medium of language. Through such linguistic devices as tense and modality, the narrator builds virtual spaces in which the narrative world is put onstage while backgrounding its rootedness in the current telling; and through linguistic embedding, voices are able to interact through the medium of other voices. In signed languages these functions of virtualizing the story space and narrative interaction are not performed only through verbal means, but also and principally by using the same physically present body in the same physical space in which the primary level of intersubjectivity is grounded and enacted. This paper will describe our research with Brazilian Sign Language narratives which focuses on how the mediation between the two layers of intersubjectivity is achieved in the gestural structuring of physical space by means of such analog media as postural shift, bodily tension, facial expression and eyegaze, building on gestural resources that are massively available in the non-linguistic performance of coordinated activity. We will assume that notions such as embodiment, intersubjectivity, and grounding, as explored in the literature of fields as diverse as philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, and robotics, are complexly interrelated radial categories. Curiously, as almost primitively central as they are to the semiotic enterprise, they all appear to bear the marks of correction and re-direction: embodiment to correct a philosophy of desembodiment; intersubjectivity to remind us of the natural habitat of the subject; and grounding to re-root symbols and discourse in the meaningful life-world from which they had flown free. The study of signed language narratives engages us in a kind of home-coming, rediscovering the meaningful wholeness of our intrinsically embodied, intersubjective, grounded experience.

Keywords: Narrative, Sign Language, Gesture, Embodiment, Intersubjectivity, Grounding