Many sign languages have semantically related noun-verb pairs, such as ‘hairbrush/brush-hair’, which are similar in form due to iconicity. Researchers studying this phenomenon in sign languages have found that the two are distinguished by subtle differences, for example, in type of movement. Here we investigate two young sign languages, Israeli Sign Language (ISL) and Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL), to determine whether they have developed a reliable distinction in the formation of noun-verb pairs, despite their youth, and, if so, how. These two young language communities differ from each other in terms of heterogeneity within the community, contact with other languages, and size of population. Using methodology we developed for cross-linguistic comparison, we identify reliable formational distinctions between nouns and related verbs in ISL, but not in ABSL, although early tendencies can be discerned. Our results show that a formal distinction in noun-verb pairs in sign languages is not necessarily present from the beginning, but may develop gradually instead. Taken together with comparative analyses of other linguistic phenomena, the results lend support to the hypothesis that certain social factors such as population size, domains of use, and heterogeneity/homogeneity of the community play a role in the emergence of grammar.

Iconicity is a relationship of resemblance or similarity between the two aspects of a sign: its form and its meaning. An iconic sign is one whose form resembles its meaning in some way. The opposite of iconicity is arbitrariness. In an arbitrary sign, the association between form and meaning is based solely on convention; there is nothing in the form of the sign that resembles aspects of its meaning. The Hindu-Arabic numerals 1, 2, 3 are arbitrary, because their current form does not correlate to any aspect of their meaning. In contrast, the Roman numerals I, II, III are iconic, because the number of occurrences of the sign I correlates with the quantity that the numerals represent. Because iconicity has to do with the properties of signs in general and not only those of linguistic signs, it plays an important role in the field of semiotics—the study of signs and signaling. However, language is the most pervasive symbolic communicative system used by humans, and the notion of iconicity plays an important role in characterizing the linguistic sign and linguistic systems. Iconicity is also central to the study of literary uses of language, such as prose and poetry. There are various types of iconicity: the form of a sign may resemble aspects of its meaning in several ways: it may create a mental image of the concept (imagic iconicity), or its structure and the arrangement of its elements may resemble the structural relationship between components of the concept represented (diagrammatic iconicity). An example of the first type is the word cuckoo, whose sounds resemble the call of the bird, or a sign such as RABBIT in Israeli Sign Language, whose form—the hands representing the rabbit's long ears—resembles a visual property of that animal. An example of diagrammatic iconicity is vēnī, vīdī, vīcī, where the order of clauses in a discourse is understood as reflecting the sequence of events in the world. Iconicity is found on all linguistic levels: phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and discourse. It is found both in spoken languages and in sign languages. However, sign languages, because of the visual-gestural modality through which they are transmitted, are much richer in iconic devices, and therefore offer a rich array of topics and perspectives for investigating iconicity, and the interaction between iconicity and language structure.

The field of sign language linguistics still misses a unified notation system such as IPA for spoken languages. Some previous attempts to create written notation systems are either not suited for phonetic analysis, or language-specific and phoneme-based and thus impossible to use in cross-linguistic studies. We describe a more recent attempt to create a purely phonetic notation system, Sign Language Phonetic Annotation (SLPA) by Johnson and Liddell (2010, 2011a, 2011b, 2012). SLPA aims for narrow phonetic notation, is easily learned by humans and machine-readable, utilizes symbols found on a common keyboard, and does not require the user to be familiar with sign languages. However, SLPA is too exhaustive (a single handshape requires 23-34 characters), incorporates some theoretical assumptions (e.g., binary features), and captures as distinctive handshapes that anatomically impossible, redundant, or perceptually nondistinctive. We propose modifications to SLPA that make it easier to use and avoid coding errors, more user-friendly, and more linguistically relevant, both general modifications suitable for manual notation and software-specific modifications. We also discuss how we intend to adapt SLPA into the Phonological CorpusTools software (Hall et al. 2015), a free tool that allows researchers to make fast, replicable analyses of various phonological patterns.

Abstract Compounding, as a nearly universal word-formation process that is very useful in emerging languages might be expected to conventionalize early in a language’s history. However, a recent study focusing on novel compounding in ISL and ABSL found that this may not be the case, and moreover, that the two languages appear to differ in how compounding is conventionalizing. (Tkachman & Meir 2018). In this paper, we follow up on their findings, using six new measures to further evaluate lexical and structural conventionalization in the same set of novel compounds elicited by Tkachman & Meir (2018). We found that ISL shows more lexical convergence, whereas ABSL shows more structural convergence. We propose that the differences in conventionalization we observe can be linked to the different social circumstances of these languages (Meir et al. 2010).

This paper investigates how structure emerges in a young language, focusing on compounding in two young sign languages, Israeli Sign Language (ISL) and Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL). We focus on novel compounds (tokens invented on the spot) to ensure that we are studying a productive process and to avoid issues contingent with lexicalization. We found that both languages make use both of compounding and size-and-shape classifier constructions (SASS-constructions), but ISL and ABSL have conventionalized different structures and the structures they do use are conventionalized to different degrees. We discuss the similarities and differences of those constructions in ISL and ABSL in the context of structure emergence and language evolution.