Pragmatics of Second Person Address Variation in New Zealand Sign Language
Date
Authors
McKee, Rachel
Vale, Mireille
Major, Georgina
Pivac Alexander, Sara
Meyerhoff, Miriam
Supervisor
Item type
Journal Article
Degree name
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Elsevier
Abstract
Expansion of contexts and purposes for the use of New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) and the affordances of online video communication modes have led to the emergence of new genre features which have not yet been described. Focusing on contemporary online informative videotexts in NZSL, we take a variationist pragmatics lens to examining variation in second person address between index-finger and whole-hand pointing forms. Forms of address are significant in the construction of social relations between speakers and addressees, having the potential to index dimensions of status, social distance and speaker stance. This study used mixed methods to investigate the use and social indexicality of a whole-hand pronominal variant in NZSL, including analysis of its distribution and associated factors in a dataset of online videotexts and data from other genres and time periods. Metapragmatic insight of NZSL signers about contextual and social motivations for the use of whole-hand pointing address enriches our interpretation of observations in the video data. In addition to confirming that the whole-hand form of address is a modern usage, participants identified four other associations with this form: genre, mode, politeness, and Māori context. We conclude that the typical use of whole-hand address in these informative online videos is a feature re-mediated from in-person public speaking contexts, which is now associated with and replicated in the online modality of this public address genre.Description
Keywords
1601 Anthropology, 1702 Cognitive Sciences, 2004 Linguistics, Languages & Linguistics, 4703 Language studies, 4704 Linguistics, 5204 Cognitive and computational psychology
Source
Lingua, ISSN: 0024-3841 (Print); 1872-6135 (Online), Elsevier, 325.
Publisher's version
Rights statement
© 2025 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)