A specific grammatical construction British Sign Language is described from a developmental perspective, using data obtained from a group of over 120 children aged 3y - 13y, acquiring BSL as a native language. These data were collected while developing a normed assessment of BSL grammar, and include measures of comprehension and production of single sentences, and narrative production.
The particular structure examined in the paper is used to describe an event where one person directs an action towards a specified body part of a second person. In the literature on other sign languages, similar structures have been described: body-anchored spatial verbs (Pizzuto 1990); locative grid verbs (Supalla 1982); body-location verbs (Bellugi et al 1990), etc. Examples of these constructions can be translated into English as: "the boy touched the girl on the shoulder" or "the girl combs the other girl's hair". The packaging of these two-participant events within BSL morpho-syntax requires the signer to locate two referents in sign space, and then articulate the verb from two different perspectives, the first perspective the agent and action e.g. "touch, comb, put" the second specifying the experiencer and the body-part affected e.g. "shoulder, hair, head". The prolonged development of the complete form of this structure is argued to be a function of the linguistic as well as cognitive complexity of this construction.
In relation to issues of management of a corpus consisting of many examples of the same target utterance, the digitisation and re-ordering of individual sentences is discussed, together with the use of Signstream for sentence coding.