Chapter 6. Reporting and role shift
In LIS, role shift (SYNTAX 3.3.3) is characterised by particular semantic and morphosyntactic properties.
Semantically, the expressions that are signed under role shift are somehow interpreted ‘from another person’s perspective’ than the actual signer, or ‘with respect to another context’ than the context of the actual speech act.
Morpho-syntactically, role shift is typically marked overtly by some non-manual articulation, which may involve: i) body shift or change in body posture, ii) head movement, iii) change in the direction of eye gaze, and/or iv) altered facial expressionsin order to mark that the signer is adopting somebody else’s perspective.
Note that role shift in LIS can be used to report utterances or thoughts of another person (so called attitude role shift) (PRAGMATICS 6.1) or to report the actions another person performed (so called action role shift) (PRAGMATICS 6.2).
