Formal variation in the Kata Kolok lexicon

Abstract

Sign language lexicons incorporate phonological specifications. Evidence from emerging sign languages suggests that phonological structure emerges gradually in a new language. In this study, we investigate variation in the form of signs across 20 deaf adult signers of Kata Kolok, a sign language that emerged spontaneously in a Balinese village community. Combining methods previously used for sign comparisons, we introduce a new numeric measure of variation. Our nuanced yet comprehensive approach to form variation integrates three levels (iconic motivation, surface realisation, feature differences) and allows for refinement through weighting the variation score by token and signer frequency. We demonstrate that variation in the form of signs appears in different degrees at different levels. Token frequency in a given dataset greatly affects how much variation can surface, suggesting caution in interpreting previous findings. Different sign variants have different scopes of use among the signing population, with some more widely used than others. Both frequency weightings (token and signer) identify dominant sign variants, i.e., sign forms that are produced frequently or by many signers. We argue that variation does not equal the absence of conventionalisation. Indeed, especially in micro-community sign languages, variation may be key to understanding patterns of language emergence.

Lexical overlap in young sign languages from Guatemala

“…As noted in other studies using lexical elicitation (Richie et al 2020;Lutzenberger et al 2021;Safar 2021), signers sometimes provided lengthy descriptions of photos or seemed to describe components of the photos that were not intended. For example, one participant, Rosa, age 7, was doing the task and saw a photo of two chickens.…”

“…The connection between community characteristics and linguistic structure has also been studied in signing communities including the Al-Sayyid Bedouin community mentioned in the introduction (Meir et al 2012) and Kata Kolok, a village sign language from Bali (de Vos 2012; Lutzenberger et al 2021;Mudd et al 2021). In their 2012 study, Meir et al compare ABSL and Israeli Sign Language (ISL).…”

“…This means that two signs that were produced with slightly different handshapes but shared an iconic relationship with the referent were considered to be overlapping. In future work, I plan to compare signs based on formational parameters like handshape and movement, similar to recent work by Lutzenberger et al (2021) which provides a detailed analysis of variation based on both iconic and formal properties of signs in Kata Kolok.…”

Exploring Networks of Lexical Variation in Russian Sign Language

“…The authors typically use the criterion in (1) to isolate separate lexical variants of signs, and then explain the distribution of these lexical variants. In some studies, the focus is on measuring variability quantitatively (e.g., Israel and Sandler, 2011;Lutzenberger et al, 2021), where both lexical and phonological variability is taken into account in order to calculate FIGURE 1 | FATHER-1 (two frames, watch here: https://osf.io/u2nej/) and FATHER-2 (two frames, watch here: https://osf.io/wt8dh/). a variability metric, but the focus is again not on distinguishing lexical vs. phonological variants, and the cases relevant to our paper are not analyzed.…”

“…Another problem concerns relying on these phonological (also known as sublexical) parameters in sign languages, as discussed by Mudd et al (2020) and Lutzenberger et al (2021) : in order to make a judgment whether, e.g., movement in two signs is the same or different, it is necessary to know which movement differences are phonological, and which are phonetic in the specific sign language. For most sign languages, phonological inventory has not been described in enough detail, and for some sign languages it has been claimed that phonology and thus phonological categories are only emerging ( Israel and Sandler, 2011 ).…”