Pronouns in LSC usually take the form of a pointing sign. However, it is important to note that pointing signs fulfill a variety of roles, as they can function as personal pronouns, possessives, determiners, demonstratives and locatives [LEXICON 1.2.2]. Pointing signs typically select the index-finger handshape and they are always directed to a location in space. As it occurs in the case of spatial modification of verbs [LEXICON 3.2.2] or classifiers [MORPHOLOGY 5], the establishment of different spatial locations associated with a referent within the pronominal system is used for grammatical purposes.
Specifically, in the case of demonstratives, determiners and possessives, pointing signs are directed towards a spatial location in order to localize the nouns that they co-appear with. Likewise, in the case of personal pronouns, the establishment of different locations in signing space allows for the introduction and retrieval of discourse referents. Namely, pointing to a location can introduce a discourse referent, while subsequent pointing signs directed to the same location are used to refer back to the same entity, thus creating discourse anaphors. In the following subsections, we will describe the mechanisms employed in LSC to express different pronominal categories.