Central Taurus Sign Language: On the Edge of Conventionalization

Abstract

We discuss the conventionalization process in Central Taurus Sign Language (CTSL), an emerging sign language in its initial stages, and present evidence from four studies for the amount of lexical and structural variation it harbors. The four studies together portray the architecture of a young system under construction. Study 1 looks at signs for everyday objects and finds considerable variation in their degree of conventionalization. Study 2 examines modifier-head and negation-head relationships, showing substantial conventionalization. Study 3 addresses the emergence and conventionalization of various word orders as argument structure markers. It shows that conventionalization increases over successive cohorts of signers, but it decreases as argument structure becomes more complex. Study 4 demonstrates the emergence and conventionalization of distinctive morphological markers to signal the subtle semantics of symmetry and reciprocity. Finally, we raise the issue of whether CTSL presents evidence of syntactic structure, or whether its properties can be characterized in terms of a simpler “linear grammar” that maps directly between phonology and semantics.

Community interactions and phonemic inventories in emerging sign languages

“…CTSL is a village sign language that has emerged within the last 50+ years in an isolated mountainous area in the Central Taurus Mountain range of Southern Turkey. The residents of the villages are natives of central Anatolia, and the small gene pool has been preserved within the community for at least seven generations (Ergin 2017, Ergin & Brentari 2017, Ergin et al 2018, Ergin et al 2021). CTSL has developed in three small neighbouring villages, with little or no influence from Turkish Sign Language.…”

Shared Context Facilitates Lexical Variation in Sign Language Emergence

“…With regards to productive synonyms, chaining forms has been attested in several shared sign languages, such as in ABSL (Meir et al 2010), SJQCSL (Hou 2016), in the sign language of Amami Island in Japan (Osugi et al 1999) and in Kata Kolok (Lutzenberger et al 2021;Mudd et al 2020). In addition, compounding is a strategy that has been observed in CTSL (Ergin et al 2021), SJQCSL (Hou 2016), in the sign language of Amami Island in Japan (Osugi et al 1999), in ABSL (Meir et al 2010) and in Kenyan Sign Language (Morgan 2015). For chaining variants together and for compounding, it is necessary that the language representation in the model allows for storing several forms per concept.…”

“…Here, we refer to sign languages in such communities as shared sign languages, following Nyst (2012). For instance, Ergin et al (2021) report that the shared sign language Central Taurus Sign Language is "remarkable in its mixture of more or less conventionalized 1 signs or sign sequences, improvised sign sequences, and competing lexical variants".…”

“…We chose to use a binary distance measure to calculate the lexical variability between agents, as opposed to a continuous distance measure, because lexical variants in the literature about sign languages are often treated categorically. This is true especially in studies of shared sign languages which consider the iconic motivation of signs (e.g., Ergin et al 2021;Mudd et al 2020). Unless two forms are identical, in the model, we treat them as different: Two different forms have a lexical variability score of 1, while identical forms have a lexical variability score of 0.…”

A Systematic Investigation of Gesture Kinematics in Evolving Manual Languages in the Lab

“…This also means that gestures with a different ordering of identical components lead to high DTW distances because they are treated as two holistic gestures in the current procedure. We will come back to this in the discussion, but it should be noted that this is a drawback of the current DTW approach as it is known that flexible ordering of components is not uncommon in, for example, early developing sign languages (e.g., Ergin, Kürşat, Hartzell, Jackendoff, 2021;Ortega & Özyürek, 2020). We used the R package "DTW" (Giorgino, 2009) to produce the multivariate distances per key point.…”