Sign-spatiality in Kata Kolok: How a village sign language in Bali inscribes its signing space

From its inception, the field of sign linguistics has been pre-occupied with the linguistic significance of sign-spatial mapping, and this thesis builds on this longstanding tradition (see for example Supalla 1978; Poizner, Klima & Bellugi 1987; Engberg-Pedersen 1993; Emmorey & Reilly 1995; Taub 2001; Liddell 2003; Perniss 2007). This dissertation presents new data from Kata Kolok, a sign language which emerged in a village community of North Bali and has been the primary means of communication for at least five generations of deaf, native signers (Marsaja 2008; this thesis). Supported by extensive periods of linguistic fieldwork, corpus analysis, as well as targeted, stimulus-based elicitation, it argues that Kata Kolok signers structure their spatial reference system preferentially on the basis of geographical locations, and that they do not utilise the dimensions of the signing space in order to talk about non-spatial concepts. Part II starts of by summarising what is currently known about Kata Kolok from genetic, anthropological, and sociolinguistic studies that began in the mid1990s. These initial descriptions form the basis for the methodological choices that led to the creation of a Kata Kolok corpus, which currently consists of almost 150 hours of video data. This digital archive includes sections devoted to spontaneous interaction, culturally entrenched narratives, as well as longitudinal recordings of first language acquisition, and deaf-hearing interactions.2 The description of research methodology more generally is followed by a grammatical sketch of