This paper examines how gesturers and signers use their bodies to express concepts such as instrumentality and humanness. Comparing across eight sign languages (American, Japanese, German, Israeli, and Kenyan Sign Languages, Ha Noi Sign Language of Vietnam, Central Taurus Sign Language of Turkey, and Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language of Israel) and the gestures of American non-signers, we find recurring patterns for naming entities in three semantic categories (tools, animals, and fruits & vegetables). These recurring patterns are captured in a classification system that identifies iconic strategies based on how the body is used together with the hands. Across all groups, tools are named with manipulation forms, where the head and torso represent those of a human agent. Animals tend to be identified with personification forms, where the body serves as a map for a comparable non-human body. Fruits & vegetables tend to be identified with object forms, where the hands act independently from the rest of the body to represent static features of the referent. We argue that these iconic patterns are rooted in using the body for communication, and provide a basis for understanding how meaningful communication emerges quickly in gesture and persists in emergent and established sign languages
AbstractThis paper investigates how systematically a young macro-community sign language, Kenyan Sign Language, uses two different means to communicate about events: (i) word order, and (ii) verb agreement using spatial co-reference. The study finds that KSL signers rely primarily on word order and using the body as a referent, rather than verb agreement, when representing transitive events. Yet, by looking separately at how KSL signers use the sub-components of verb agreement, a pattern emerges that indicates a possible path toward ‘canonical verb agreement’. These sub-components are evaluated using Meir’s stages/types of grammaticalization of verb agreement (Meir 2011, 2016), and compared with other young and emerging sign languages.
This paper investigates whether two-handed signs in Kenyan Sign Language, a relatively young school-based sign language, conform to the same constraints on combinations of movement and handshape that hold in other sign languages. An analysis of 467 two-handed signs, separated into four types based on complexity, found that KSL is highly constrained, with only a few signs that violate proposed conditions. Three hypotheses to account for handshape restrictions on the non-dominant hand in highly complex signs are tested. Findings show that a universal unmarked set accounts for most of these handshapes; a languagespecific unmarked set does no better; and a constraint on markedness at the featural level essentially accounts for all the signs. Further analyses discover that a preference for unmarked handshapes in the most complex signs extends to all two-handed signs to some degree. Finally, a phonotactic preference for the G/1 handshape on the dominant hand in complex signs is uncovered. Some evidence suggests that this tendency may surface in other languages as well.
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