Indexicals under role shift in Sign Language of the Netherlands Experimental insights

When reporting utterances, signers often use a construction known as quotation role shift (RS), where the signer embodies the author of the report while making use of a dedicated set of non-manual markers (RS-NMMs). First (IX-1) and second (IX-2) person pronouns in those constructions are often observed to shift their meaning to refer to there ported author and the addressee. This article focuses on the behavior of these pronouns in Sign Language of the Netherlands. We designed an experiment targeting the interpretation of IX-1 and IX-2 under RS-NMMs. Results obtained from 13 participants show that, while IX-2 is sensitive to RS-NMMs, the interpretation of IX-1 varies across signers but is not influenced by RS-NMMs. Building upon distinctive phonological, lexical and interpretive properties of these pronouns, we argue that the interpretation ofIX-2 behaves as a genuine shifted indexical, while IX-1 is better analyzed as a logophor.