Abstract

Theoretical convergence has played an important role in signed language research. Stokoe pioneered linguistic convergence of signed and spoken language by demonstrating that signed languages possess phonology. Certain problems have arisen, however, concerning the basic elements of sign phonology, specifically location. Whereas location has been defined as the location of the hand, signers refer to entities in the environment and to discourse entities outside the reach of the hand. An example of the latter is agreement or indicating verbs, where the locations at which the hands are directed have been treated as gesture. I offer a cognitive grammar account of sign phonology, focusing on the status of location. The elements of sign phonology are shown to be conceptual entities. I introduce the concept of Place, a symbolic structure consisting of a semantic pole and a phonological pole, w hich i s a spatial location. T he u se o f Place i n discourse a nd i n grammatical constructions such as indicating verbs is demonstrated with data from Argentine Sign Language. Implications of this approach for a more natural theoretical convergence are discussed.