To shift or not to shift: Indexical attraction in role shift in German Sign Language

There are two main competing views about the nature of sign language role shift within formal semantics today: Quer (2005) and Schlenker (2017a,b), following now standard analyses of indexical shift in spoken languages, analyze it as a so­called ‘monstrous operator’, while K. Davidson (2015) and Maier (2017), following more traditional and cognitive approaches, analyze it as form of quotation. Examples of role shift in which some indexicals are shifted and some unshifted pose a prima facie problem for both approaches. We show that the quotational approach can deal with these examples in terms of unquotation and a pragmatic principle of ‘attraction’. We present a systematic empirical investigation of the predictions of the quotation/attraction approach in DGS (German Sign Language). Results for the second person pronoun IX₂, fully support the attraction hypothesis, while results for IX₁ and HERE are inconclusive.