Sign Language & Linguistics - Volume 19, Issue 1, 2016

Bringing together the areas of sign language semantics-pragmatics interface and discourse reference, this article offers a description of how indefiniteness and (non‑)specificity is encoded in Catalan Sign Language (LSC). By using a combined methodology of corpus data and grammatical tests, the present study shows that the encoding of indefiniteness and specificity in LSC is achieved by three main means, namely lexical signs, the use of nonmanuals, and the use of signing space. The basic primitives required to analyze specificity in LSC comprise wide scope, epistemicity, and partitivity. This article proposes an analysis of the use of signing space in contributing meaning and provides insights into the characterization of the abstract import of signing space.

Traditionally in sign language research, the issue of whether a lexical sign is articulated with one hand or two has been treated as a strictly phonological matter. We argue that accounting for two-handed signs also requires considering meaning as a motivating factor. We report results from a Swadesh list comparison, an analysis of semantic patterns among two-handed signs, and a picture-naming task. Comparing four unrelated languages, we demonstrate that the two hands are recruited to encode various relationship types in sign language lexicons. We develop the general principle that inherently “plural” concepts are straightforwardly mapped onto our paired human hands, resulting in systematic use of the two hands across sign languages. In our analysis, “plurality” subsumes four primary relationship types — interaction, location, dimension, and composition — and we predict that signs with meanings that encompass these relationships — such as ‘meet’, ‘empty’, ‘large’, or ‘machine’ — will preferentially be two-handed in any sign language.

This study explores whether American Sign Language (ASL) users exhibit frequency effects on two-sign combinations as observed in spoken languages. Studies on spoken languages have demonstrated that frequency of usage influences the emergence of grammatical constructions; however, there has been less investigation of this question for signed languages. To examine frequency effects in ASL, this study analyzes patterns of a grammatical manual negation morpheme glossed as NOT produced sequentially with other signs. Findings reveal that NOT is produced with specific signs, demonstrating that the grammaticalization of NOT increases as frequency does in ASL collocations. The analysis shows that a few signs are highly phonologically fused with the negation marker, providing emerging evidence that these collocations have experienced chunking, as they are schematic, fused constituent structures in ASL. Given frequency effects found in the study, chunking appears to be a domain-general cognitive processing mechanism independent of modality effects.