While visual signals that accompany spoken language serve to augment the communicative message, the same visual ingredients form the substance of the linguistic system in sign languages. This article provides an analysis of visual signals that comprise part of the intonational system of a sign language. The system is conveyed mainly by particular actions of the upper face, and is shown to pattern linguistically and predictably in Israeli Sign Language. Its components, aligned with prosodic constituents, are associated with particular but general meanings and may be combined to derive complex meanings. The Brow Raise component is functionally comparable to H tones, signaling continuation and dependency, and characterizing yes/no questions and the if-clause of conditionals, for example. The component Squint instructs the addressee to retrieve information that is not readily accessible, and characterizes relative clauses, topics, and other structures. The details of the componential analysis proposed here explain why the two components together co-occur on such seemingly diverse structures as yes/no questions about mutually retrievable information and counterfactual conditionals. Like auditorily perceived intonational melodies, the visual intonational arrays in sign language provide a subtle, intricately structured, and meaningful accompaniment to the words and sentences of language.

The relation between prosody and syntax is investigated here by tracing the emergence of each in a new language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language. We analyze the structure of narratives of four signers of this language: two older second generation signers, and two about 15 years younger. We find that younger signers produce prosodic cues to dependency between semantically related constituents, e.g., the two clauses of conditionals, revealing a type and degree of complexity in their language that is not frequent in that of the older pair. In these younger signers, several rhythmic and (facial) intonational cues are aligned at constituent boundaries, indicating the emergence of a grammatical system. There are no overt syntactic markers (such as complementizers) to relate clauses; prosody is the only clue. But this prosodic complexity is matched by syntactic complexity inside propositions in the younger signers, who are more likely to use pronouns as abstract grammatical markers of arguments, and to combine predicates with their arguments within in a constituent. As the prosodic means emerge for identifying constituent types and signaling dependency relations between them, the constituents themselves become increasingly complex. Finally, our study shows that the emergence of grammatical complexity is gradual.

In a detailed comparison of the intonational systems of two unrelated languages, Israeli Sign Language and American Sign Language, we show certain similarities as well as differences in the distribution of several articulations of different parts of the face and motions of the head. Differences between the two languages are explained on the basis of pragmatic notions related to information structure, such as accessibility and contingency, providing novel evidence that the system is inherently intonational, and only indirectly related to syntax. The study also identifies specific ways in which the physical modality in which language is expressed influences intonational structure.

A universally acknowledged, core property of language is its complexity, at each level of structure – sounds, words, phrases, clauses, utterances, and higher levels of discourse. How does this complexity originate and develop in a language? We cannot fully answer this question from spoken languages, since they are all thousands of years old or descended from old languages. However, sign languages of deaf communities can arise at any time and provide empirical data for testing hypotheses related to the emergence of language complexity. An added advantage of the signed modality is a correspondence between visible physical articulations and linguistic structures, providing a more transparent view of linguistic complexity and its emergence (Sandler, 2012). These essential characteristics of sign languages allow us to address the issue of emerging complexity by documenting the use of the body for linguistic purposes. We look at three types of discourse relations of increasing complexity motivated by research on spoken languages – additive, symmetric, and asymmetric (Mann and Thompson, 1988; Sanders et al., 1992). Each relation type can connect units at two different levels: within propositions (simpler) and across propositions (more complex).1 We hypothesized that these relations provide a measure for charting the time course of emergence of complexity, from simplest to most complex, in a new sign language. We test this hypothesis on Israeli Sign Language (ISL), a young language, some of whose earliest users are still available for recording. Taking advantage of the unique relation in sign languages between bodily articulations and linguistic form, we study fifteen ISL signers from three generations, and demonstrate that the predictions indeed hold. We also find that younger signers tend to converge on more systematic marking of relations, that they use fewer articulators for a given linguistic function than older signers, and that the form of articulations becomes reduced, as the language matures. Mapping discourse relations to the bodily expression of linguistic components across age groups reveals how simpler, less constrained, and more gesture-like expressions, become language.

This paper introduces data from Kafr Qasem Sign Language (KQSL), an as-yet undescribed sign language, and identifies the earliest indications of embedding in this young language. Using semantic and prosodic criteria, we identify predicates that form a constituent with a noun, functionally modifying it. We analyze these structures as instances of embedded predicates, exhibiting what can be regarded as very early stages in the development of subordinate constructions, and argue that these structures may bear directly on questions about the development of embedding and subordination in language in general. Deutscher (2009) argues persuasively that nominalization of a verb is the first step—and the crucial step—toward syntactic embedding. It has also been suggested that prosodic marking may precede syntactic marking of embedding (Mithun, 2009). However, the relevant data from the stage at which embedding first emerges have not previously been available. KQSL might be the missing piece of the puzzle: a language in which a noun can be modified by an additional predicate, forming a proposition within a proposition, sustained entirely by prosodic means.