The Arbitrary Name Sign System in American Sign Language

Left/right and front/back in sign, speech, and co-speech gestures: What do data from Turkish Sign Language, Croatian Sign Language, American Sign Language, Turkish, Croatian, and English reveal?

“…These findings also supported previous observations that indicated that in sign language, expressions included complex predicates, classifiers, to encode features such as location and motion of spatial relations (e.g. Supalla 1986;Engberg-Pedersen 1993;Emmorey 2003). In contrast, the speakers used a variety of lexical items and predicates to encode the spatial information for axis, location, orientation and situation in the photos.…”

“…Crucially, sign languages usually do not have to use lexical items such as 'left', 'right', 'front', and 'back' with the exception of Kata Kolok, a sign language in Bali, which uses a system of absolute pointing similar to the use of an absolute frame of reference in spoken languages (Perniss and Zeshan 2008). Instead, Kata Kolok signers construct spatial relations by using "verbs of location and motion" (Supalla 1986;Engberg-Pedersen 1993). Keller's analysis (1998) of German Sign Language has argued that the linguistic use of space is all anaphoric in nature suggesting that relational elements for grammatical space/path-features, and feature checking in pronouns/agreement verbs are conveyed by using the signing space.…”

Locative expressions in signed languages: a view from Turkish Sign Language (TİD)

“…(ii) Handling classifiers, which represent the handling or manipulation of referents, usually by an animate referent (e.g., a handshape in which the index finger and thumb touch ( ) can represent the handling of a small or thin entity, such as a sheet of paper or a single flower); (iii) Size and Shape Specifiers (SASSes) form another often mentioned type of classifier: these elements convey properties of the referent's size and shape by tracing the outline of the referent or by indicating its dimensional extensions, whereby the handshape contributes to the information about shape and size (see Brennan 1990;Engberg-Pedersen 1993;Liddell and Johnson 1987;Supalla 1982Supalla , 1986. In the example from German Sign Language (DGS) in (6), the signer uses SASSes in his description of the relative locations of a yellow and red cone next to each other.…”

“…"polymorphemic" structures [Engberg-Pederson 1993]). First of all, classifier predicates have been analyzed to contain at least two morphemes that can be simultaneously expressed: a classifier that represents the referent in the predicate (phonologically expressed by a particular handshape or a combination of handshapes) and a directed movement through sign space or a short movement directed towards a particular location in sign space (among others Supalla 1982Supalla , 1986Engberg-Pederson 1993;Zwitserlood 2003). Second, in such structures the Ground can be represented simultaneously with the Figure.…”

“…Alternative analyses of such forms (that occurred in 16 out of 104 responses for plural objects) might seem more obvious at first blush. One would be that these are instances of number incorporation in classifier predicates, where each referent is represented by a classifier (expressed with an extended finger), combined within one hand (see Supalla 1982Supalla , 1986 for ASL; Zwitser-lood 2003 for NGT). Another possibility would be that these are number signs localized in sign space, similar to direct localization of objects by articulation of a noun sign at a position in sign space (as explained in more detail in Section 4.3.3).…”