A Grammar of Turkish Sign Language (TİD)

In action role shift or constructed action, the signer imitates real world actions and facial expressions. This special type of ‘quotation’ or reported action involves a considerable degree of facial expressions, head and body movements as expressive means to narrate an event in a vivid manner. Eye gaze break and body rotation are important characteristics in constructed action as in attitude role shift. The spatial arrangement of referents and actions is based on the vantage point of the reported actor in character perspective, or role shifted utterance can involve elements from both character and observer perspectives yielding an interaction with transitivity and classifier types [Pragmatics - Section 8.3]. The amount of visual detail is up to the signer’s narrative style. See below two examples where the same event is produced without and with action role shift respectively:

dog man_a ix_a bite_a
 

 

                      rs: dog

dog man ix_a bite_a

 

 

Here is an example with an intransitive verb walk:



man walk

'The man walks.'

 

The same event can be expressed with more visual details as in the example below:         

                     rs: man, joyful   

man joyful walk   

‘The man walks joyfully.’     

 

The action role shift portion of the sentences above only contains the imitation of an animate entity (the dog, the man). Action role shift can also incorporate lexical and classifier predicates[Morphology - Chapter 5]. The two events in the examples above are presented with alternative realizations with various combinations of role shift with lexical, and classifier predicates.

Action role shift combined with classifier predicates:

                            rs: man-slow       

man self slow                   CL:'person'

'The man is walking slowly.’    

Action role shift combined with both lexical and classifier predicates:

 

                                                                      rs: ıx_1, afraid________________________________________  

ıx₁ self go walk, back somethıng exıst,  CL:‘eyes_back’ obscure dog ix_a fear CL:‘person_walk’ run_away

‘I was walking. I looked back and feared whether there is a dog. I walked with fear and ran away.’