Abstract

Frame-relative fictive motion describes a linguistic phenomenon whereby the motion of an entity is communicated via the – fictive – motion of stationary background objects. For instance, a woman’s experience of riding on a fast train might be described as The trees rushed past her. Such fictive-motion constructions allow the addressee to see the point of view of a character in a narrative, but in sign languages, they perform additional tasks. Our quantitative study of fictive motion in narratives in German Sign Language (DGS) demonstrates how it allows signers to depict distance, speed, and point of view while circumventing constraints imposed by anatomy/physiology and phonology. Data from nine additional sign languages confirm this range of uses. In contrast to spoken languages, sign languages allow the combination of factive- and fictive-motion depiction in one sentence, posing problems for a purely morphological analysis of the movement parameter in classifier constructions. This work shows that both cognitive-perceptual and anatomical matters shape sign language grammars.