Sign languages are naturally occurring languages. As such, their emergence and spread reflect the histories of their communities. However, limitations in historical recordkeeping and linguistic documentation have hindered the diachronic analysis of sign languages. In this work, we used computational phylogenetic methods to study family structure among 19 sign languages from deaf communities worldwide. We used phonologically coded lexical data from contemporary languages to infer relatedness and suggest that these methods can help study regular form changes in sign languages. The inferred trees are consistent in key respects with known historical information but challenge certain assumed groupings and surpass analyses made available by traditional methods. Moreover, the phylogenetic inferences are not reducible to geographic distribution but do affirm the importance of geopolitical forces in the histories of human languages.

By analyzing the pitch accents, edge tones, and eyebrow movements of African American English (AAE) speakers, this study examines the coordination of prosody and co-speech gestures. Twelve self-identified AAE speakers engaged in scripted dialogues with an AAE-speaking confederate via Zoom. Half of the dialogues contained the polysemous AAE idiomatic phrase “you good” which has declarative and interrogative forms hypothesized to be distinguished by various eyebrow and intonation patterns. The other dialogues included non-idiomatic phrases semantically related to their “you good” equivalents. These dialogues were designed to explore whether the coordination patterns for the idioms occur with non-idiomatic utterances of the same sentence type. Acoustic data is prosodically annotated using the MAE-ToBI transcription system and visual eyebrow data is tracked using OpenFace 2.0, a facial landmark detection toolkit. The derived eyebrow movement trajectories are time-aligned with the pitch trajectories for the semi-automatic labeling of multimodal signals. The temporal relationship between eyebrow movement landmarks, pitch accents, and edge tones is examined to investigate how different meanings and sentence types are created through their coordination. Preliminary examination indicates intonationally similar contours for the idiomatic and non-idiomatic interrogative phrases, but shared and consistent intonational contours are not evident in the declarative data.

By analyzing the pitch accents, edge tones, and eyebrow movements of African American English (AAE) speakers, this study examines the coordination of prosody and co-speech gestures. Twelve self-identified AAE speakers engaged in scripted dialogues with an AAE-speaking confederate via Zoom. Half of the dialogues contained the polysemous AAE idiomatic phrase “you good” which has declarative and interrogative forms hypothesized to be distinguished by various eyebrow and intonation patterns. The other dialogues included non-idiomatic phrases semantically related to their “you good” equivalents. These dialogues were designed to explore whether the coordination patterns for the idioms occur with non-idiomatic utterances of the same sentence type. Acoustic data is prosodically annotated using the MAE-ToBI transcription system and visual eyebrow data is tracked using OpenFace 2.0, a facial landmark detection toolkit. The derived eyebrow movement trajectories are time-aligned with the pitch trajectories for the semi-automatic labeling of multimodal signals. The temporal relationship between eyebrow movement landmarks, pitch accents, and edge tones is examined to investigate how different meanings and sentence types are created through their coordination. Preliminary examination indicates intonationally similar contours for the idiomatic and non-idiomatic interrogative phrases, but shared and consistent intonational contours are not evident in the declarative data.

The noun–verb distinction has long been considered a fundamental property of human language, and has been found in some form even in the earliest stages of language emergence, including homesign and the early generations of emerging sign languages. We present two experimental studies that use silent gesture to investigate how noun–verb distinctions develop in the manual modality through two key processes: (i) improvising using novel signals by individuals, and (ii) using those signals in the interaction between communicators. We operationalise communicative interaction in two ways: a setting in which members of the dyad were in separate booths and were given a comprehension test after each stimulus vs. a more naturalistic face-to-face conversation without comprehension checks. There were few differences between the two conditions, highlighting the robustness of the paradigm. Our findings from both experiments reflect patterns found in naturally emerging sign languages. Some formal distinctions arise in the earliest stages of improvisation and do not require interaction to develop. However, the full range of formal distinctions between nouns and verbs found in naturally emerging language did not appear with either improvisation or interaction, suggesting that transmitting the language to a new generation of learners might be necessary for these properties to emerge.

Linguistic analysis is improved when it includes language beyond the spoken modality. This paper uses sign language data to explore and advance cross-linguistic typologies of reflexives , constructions expressing that co-arguments of a predicate are also co-referent. In doing so, we also demonstrate that the lexical item KENDİ in Turkish Sign Language ( henceforth , TİD) can function as a traditional reflexive, in addition to its previously documented emphatic functions. We further show that KENDİ is a DP-type reflexive, which helps to explain the emphatic usages of KENDİ that have been the focus of previous research. We end by outlining a plan for future research that can further probe and unify the superficially distinct functions of KENDİ and the typology of anaphoricity across modalities. Data for the present research comes from recently conducted fieldwork interviews with two signers of the İstanbul dialect of TİD, both of whom have been exposed to TİD since birth.

The syntactic study of determiner phrases (DPs) has focused on the optional and obligatory constituents of the DP across languages, the word order patterns among these constituents, and the morphosyntactic manifestation of relations between DP-internal constituents. The discussion is contextualized within the broader theoretical issue of whether a determiner layer is necessary in order for a nominal constituent to have argumental status and function as a referential expression. The discussion is contextualized within the broader theoretical issue of whether a determiner layer is necessary in order for a nominal constituent to have argumental status and function as a referential expression. If the Event Visibility Hypothesis is active across sign languages, as Wilbur proposes that it is, and if languages, signed and spoken, share a computational engine, then it is unsurprising that nominalization processes are formationally similar an across sign languages.

Human languages, signed and spoken, can be characterized by the structural patterns they use to associate communicative forms with meanings. One such pattern is paradigmatic morphology, where complex words are built from the systematic use and re-use of sub-lexical units. Here, we provide evidence of emergent paradigmatic morphology akin to number inflection in a communication system developed without input from a conventional language, homesign. We study the communication systems of four deaf child homesigners (mean age 8;02). Although these idiosyncratic systems vary from one another, we nevertheless find that all four children use handshape and movement devices productively to express cardinal and non-cardinal number information, and that their number expressions are consistent in both form and meaning. Our study shows, for the first time, that all four homesigners not only incorporate number devices into representational devices used as predicates , but also into gestures functioning as nominals, including deictic gestures. In other words, the homesigners express number by systematically combining and re-combining additive markers for number (qua inflectional morphemes) with representational and deictic gestures (qua bases). The creation of new, complex forms with predictable meanings across gesture types and linguistic functions constitutes evidence for an inflectional morphological paradigm in homesign and expands our understanding of the structural patterns of language that are, and are not, dependent on linguistic input.

Sign languages are conventionalized linguistic systems that vary across communities of users and change as they are transmitted across generations or come into contact with other languages, signed or spoken. That is, the social and linguistic phenomena that are familiar from the study of spoken language families and historical linguistic analysis of spoken languages are also active in sign languages. The study of sign language families and histories, however, is not as developed as in spoken languages. Here, we discuss the methodological and circumstantial factors contributing to this disparity. We also report on the preliminary stages of a long-term, large-scale study of sign language families. We summarize the family structures suggested by a historical records analysis of 24 sign languages. Given the limitations of this approach for sign languages, however, we also propose a lexicostatistic analysis using contemporary quantitative methods and describe annotation tools and strategies that can facilitate this approach. This research is aimed at improving our understanding of the historical pressures that are shared across language modalities as well as the quantitative and qualitative differences that may exist in the diachrony of sign versus speech. movement for and trajectory of as specified below. co-occur and our system;

In a number of signed languages, the distinction between nouns and verbs is evident in the morphophonology of the signs themselves. Here we use a novel elicitation paradigm to investigate the systematicity, emergence, and development of the noun-verb distinction (qua objects vs. actions) in an established sign language, American Sign Language (ASL), an emerging sign language, Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL), and in the precursor to NSL, Nicaraguan homesigns. We show that a distinction between nouns and verbs is marked (by utterance position and movement size) and thus present in all groups-even homesigners, who have invented their systems without a conventional language model. However, there is also evidence of emerging crosslinguistic variation in whether a base hand is used to mark the noun-verb contrast. Finally, variation in how movement repetition and base hand are used across Nicaraguan groups offers insight into the pressures that influence the development of a linguistic system. Specifically, early signers of NSL use movement repetition and base hand in ways similar to homesigners but different from signers who entered the NSL community more recently, suggesting that intergenerational transmission to new learners (not just sharing a language with a community) plays a key role in the development of these devices. These results bear not only on the importance of the noun-verb distinction in human communication, but also on how this distinction emerges and develops in a new (sign) language.*

During communication, speakers commonly rotate their forearms so that their palms turn upward. Yet despite more than a century of observations of such palm-up gestures, their meanings and origins have proven difficult to pin down. We distinguish two gestures within the palm-up form family: the palm-up presentational and the palm-up epistemic. The latter is a term we introduce to refer to a variant of the palm-up that prototypically involves lateral separation of the hands. This gesture—our focus—is used in speaking communities around the world to express a recurring set of epistemic meanings, several of which seem quite distinct. More striking, a similar palm-up form is used to express the same set of meanings in many established sign languages and in emerging sign systems. Such observations present a two-part puzzle: the first part is how this set of seemingly distinct meanings for the palm-up epistemic are related, if indeed they are; the second is why the palm-up form is so widely used to express just this set of meanings. We propose a network connecting the different attested meanings of the palm-up epistemic, with a kernel meaning of absence of knowledge, and discuss how this proposal could be evaluated through additional developmental, corpus-based, and experimental research. We then assess two contrasting accounts of the connection between the palm-up form and this proposed meaning network, and consider implications for our understanding of the palm-up form family more generally. By addressing the palm-up puzzle, we aim, not only to illuminate a widespread form found in gesture and sign, but also to provide insights into fundamental questions about visual-bodily communication: where communicative forms come from, how they take on new meanings, and how they become integrated into language in signing communities.

Several online dictionaries documenting the lexicon of a variety of sign languages (SLs) are now available. These are rich resources for comparative studies, but there are methodological issues that must be addressed regarding how these resources are used for research purposes. We created a web-based tool for annotating the articulatory features of signs (handshape, location, movement and orientation). Videos from online dictionaries may be embedded in the tool, providing a mechanism for large-scale theoretically-informed sign language annotation. Annotations are saved in a spreadsheet format ready for quantitative and qualitative analyses. Here, we provide proof of concept for the utility of this tool in linguistic analysis. We used the SL adaptation of the Swadesh list (Woodward, 2000) and applied lexicostatistic and phylogenetic methods to a sample of 23 SLs coded using the web-based tool; supplementary historic information was gathered from the Ethnologue of World Languages and other online sources. We report results from the comparison of all articulatory features for four Asian SLs (Chinese, Hong Kong, Taiwanese and Japanese SLs) and from the comparison of handshapes on the entire 23 language sample. Handshape analysis of the entire sample clusters all Asian SLs together, separated from the European, American, and Brazilian SLs in the sample, as historically expected. Within the Asian SL cluster, analyses also show, for example, marginal relatedness between Chinese and Hong Kong SLs.

Human language can be signed or spoken. Thus, we should only consider as fundamental those properties of language that hold in both of these equipotential modalities. Modality-specific properties of either sign or speech must instead be attributed to the interaction of the linguistic system with the systems of production and perception. This chapter explores both the modality-independent and the modality-dependent properties of syntactic categorization in sign languages. Categorization of linguistic expressions and the use of categorical properties to determine syntactic distribution and guide syntactic structure building appear to be modality-independent properties of language, as are the broad categorical divisions attested (e.g., lexical vs. functional, noun vs. verb). When the examination turns to fine-grained categorical or sub-categorical distinctions and the actual morphosyntactic patterns that distinguish these categories within a given language or class of languages, however, certain patterns of modality-dependence do emerge, such as the sign language preference for simultaneous (vs. sequential) structure. Nevertheless, as in other areas of language study, the patterns attested in syntactic categorization in sign languages overlap significantly with those documented in spoken languages. This provides further support for the proposal that the properties of human language are not primarily driven by the modality of transmission but are only secondarily beholden to it.

After presenting some basic genetic, historical and typological information about American Sign Language, this chapter outlines the quantification patterns it expresses. It illustrates various semantic types of quantifiers, such as generalized existential, generalized universal, proportional, definite and partitive which are defined in the Quantifier Questionnaire in chapter “ The Quantifier Questionnaire ”. It partitions the expression of the semantic types into morpho-syntactic classes: Adverbial type quantifiers and Nominal (or Determiner) type quantifiers. For the various semantic and morpho-syntactic types of quantifiers it also distinguishes syntactically simple and syntactically complex quantifiers, as well as issues of distributivity and scope interaction, classifiers and measure expressions, and existential constructions. The chapter describes structural properties of determiners and quantified noun phrases in American Sign Language, both in terms of internal structure (morphological or syntactic) and distribution.

Nominalizing reduplication in American Sign Language (ASL) is an ambiguous process that can derive both concrete object- and result-denoting nominals. The properties of this nominalization process, including this ambiguity, are accounted for here by appealing to the discrete and surface transparent morphology that the language uses to encode components of event (Wilbur 2003, 2010) and argument (Benedicto & Brentari 2004) structure. Nominalizing reduplication is shown to be a process that nominalizes (and reduplicates) only the low portion of verbal structure responsible for encoding the event result (VPres). Direct nominalization of this VPres constituent yields nominals with result-denoting interpretations. Concrete object-denoting interpretations may arise when the verbal structure contains an argument classifier, which is evident in the handshape of the verbal predicate. In such cases, the nominal argument introduced by the classifier serves as the input to (reduced) relative clause formation, yielding a concrete object-denoting interpretation. The interpretive ambiguity is thus reduced to ambiguity in the syntactic structure underlying the derived nominal. This approach falls in line with longstanding structural approaches to nominalization and more recent proposals regarding processes of reduplication (Inkelas & Zoll 2005).

Humans communicate using language, but they also communicate using gesture - spontaneous movements of the hands and body that universally accompany speech. Gestures can be distinguished from other movements, segmented, and assigned meaning based on their forms and functions. Moreover, gestures systematically integrate with language at all levels of linguistic structure, as evidenced in both production and perception. Viewed typologically, gesture is universal, but nevertheless exhibits constrained variation across language communities (as does language itself ). Finally, gesture has rich cognitive dimensions in addition to its communicative dimensions. In overviewing these and other topics, we show that the study of language is incomplete without the study of its communicative partner, gesture.

This dissertation presents two extensive case studies in the morpho-syntactic structure of American Sign Language (ASL) based on original fieldwork conducted with native, deaf signers.The first case study focuses on the structure of attributive and predicative POSS possessives. Based on language-internal diagnostics, this study shows that the possessive marker, POSS, functions as a verbal predicate of possession, not as a DP-internal marker of the possessive relation. The structure and interpretation of predicative POSS possessives are reduced to the interaction of the verbal POSS structure with two functional components of the predicative domain: (i) locative structure and (ii) licensing positions of definite objects. Attributive POSS possessives are derived as prenominal reduced relative clause modifiers formed from this underlying predicative structure. The second case study presented here addresses the structural uniformity and semantic ambiguity of two classes of deverbal nominals formed via reduplication in ASL: concrete object-denoting nominals and result-denoting nominals. Based on a morpho-semantic decomposition of verbal structure that is transparent in the surface form of verbal predicates in ASL, it is shown that nominalization via reduplication targets the lowest constituent of the verbal structure (VP-Res ). Nominalization of VP-Res yields the class of result-denoting nominals, while concrete object-denoting nominals are derived as relative clause structures headed by a nominal argument that is introduced by the classifier structure present in the relevant verbal forms.

This article addresses the derivational relationship between attributive (nominal) and predicative (verbal) possessives marked by the poss sign in American Sign Language. Though traditionally classified as a possessive pronoun, a collection of morphological, syntactic, and semantic patterns is presented here as evidence that poss instead displays the distributional characteristics of a verbal predicate in the language. Classifying poss as a verbal predicate of possession explains its presence in predicative possessives and allows its attributive use to be derived from this underlying verbal structure as an instance of a prenominal reduced relative clause modifier. These base structures and their interaction with other components of the predicative and attributive domains explain the documented properties of attributive and predicative poss possessives, including, crucially, the sometimes divergent behaviors of these two possessive constructions.