Linguistic Foundations of Narration in Spoken and Sign Languages

Sign languages have the unique property of simultaneously transmitting information in various ways. Within perspective taking and role shift, a signer may use various articulators such as the hands, the body, and the face to simultaneously represent different protagonists and/or the narrator. This paper discusses data from German Sign Language (DGS) with regard to parallel perspectivation in role shift, in particular action role shift found in the DGS data set of the Aesop fables. We categorize