Quotation in Russian Sign Language: a corpus study

We studied how quotation is expressed in naturalistic discourse in Russian Sign Language (RSL). We studied a sub-corpus of the online corpus of RSL containing narratives by eleven signers from Moscow. We identified 341 instances of quotation, including reported speech and reported thoughts. We annotated syntactic, semantic, and prosodic properties of the found instances of quotation. We found out that quotative constructions in RSL have the same basic structure as similar constructions in other spoken and signed languages. Furthermore, similarly to quotation in other sign languages, quotation in RSL can be marked by head and/or body movement and change in eye gaze direction. However, all of these markers are clearly optional, and a considerable number of examples do not include any of these markers. Furthermore, we found that, judging by the behavior of indexicals, RSL narratives in our dataset have a very strong preference for using direct speech. We discuss theoretical implications of the RSL data to the theory of quotation in sign languages.