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 the
reported 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 of
IX-2 behaves as a genuine shifted indexical, while IX-1 is better analyzed as a logophor.