Traveling Shots in Language: Toward an Analysis of Dynamic Viewpoints in ASL
Philippe Schlenker, Jason Lamberton, Jonathan Lamberton · Linguistic Inquiry · 2025
In sign language, classifier predicates have a highly iconic semantics, which has motivated the development of a formal framework (Iconological Semantics) with a pictorial component evaluated relative to viewpoint variables. But in this framework, viewpoints are static. We argue that this analysis fails to capture a well-documented phenomenon in several sign languages: sometimes classifier movement (e.g., of a tree-denoting classifier) is used to represent the apparent motion of a static object relative to a moving viewpoint, a narrative technique corresponding to traveling cameras in film. To address this problem, we propose that viewpoint variables may denote dynamic (traveling) viewpoints. We consider two analyses: one in which all viewpoints can be dynamic, the other in which only viewpoints introduced by Role Shift (analyzed as overt context shift) can be. For lack of a consensus on the definition of Role Shift, both options are currently open.