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Abstract

This paper discusses the expression of time through spatial means in village sign languages of Indonesia, Ghana, Thailand, and Mexico. In the urban signing varieties reported thus far, the typical timeline runs along the signer’s sagittal axis, and is split at the signer's centre, such that the area behind the signer represents the past, and the front of the signer represents the future. This paper shows that the front-back timeline may be the typologically prevalent structure, but it is not the only option, and time can be projected onto space in a number of different ways. The main timeline in Chican Village Sign Language (Mexico) projects the past onto the signing space in front of the signer, and the future is conceptualised above the signer's head. Both Adamorobe Sign Language (Ghana) and Ban Khor Sign Language (Thailand) have adopted a vertically oriented timeline, but representing time from bottom to top and top to bottom respectively. Kata Kolok signers (Bali) do not make use of any of the body-anchored timelines, and have adopted a celestial timeline, running from East to West instead. These findings indicate that the impact of the visual modality is limited in the conceptualisation of temporal relations in sign languages, and that sign languages may utilise each of the dimensions of signing space to express temporal relations. These preliminary reports suggest that village sign languages – being language isolates –may continue to make unique contributions to our understanding of the typological variation among sign languages.