Situations of language contact are often the norm for sign languages. This article investigates a case of unimodal contact between Cena, a young sign language in its third generation that is used in a small rural community in Brazil, and Libras, the national sign language of Brazil. Our analysis concerns one by-product of this contact: reiterative…

One of the fundamental issues for a language is its capacity to express argument structure unambiguously. This study presents evidence for the emergence and the incremental development of these basic mechanisms in a newly developing language, Central Taurus Sign Language. Our analyses identify universal patterns in both the emergence and…

Because sign languages have two main articulators, signers simultaneously experience both possibilities and constraints in the articulation and perception of linguistic messages. Sign languages commonly convey different linguistic units with each hand, and additional information is conveyed in nonmanual signals. Meaningful perseverations (or sign…

Research interest in heritage speakers and their patterns of bilingual development has grown substantially over the last decade, prompting sign language researchers to consider how the concepts of heritage language and heritage speakers apply in the Deaf community. This overview builds on previous proposals that ASL [American Sign Language] and…

In this paper the results of an investigation of word order in Russian Sign Language (RSL) are presented. A small corpus of narratives based on comic strips by nine native signers was analyzed and a picture-description experiment (based on Volterra et al. 1984) was conducted with six native signers. The results are the following: the most frequent…

This article contains a literature review of evidence of large prosodic domains that correspond to syntactic units such as a clause or a sentence. In particular, different phonetic nonmanual cues that may relate to clause or sentence boundaries are discussed in detail. On the basis of various ideas and views in the literature, we also describe two…

Lexicographers, teachers and interpreters of New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) are challenged by the degree of lexical variation that exists in this young language. For instance, most numerals between one and twenty have two or more variants in common use (McKee, McKee, and Major 2008), a situation that contrasts with most established spoken…

This article investigates the role of iconicity in International Sign Language (ISL), as used by interpreters for Deaf people at international conferences. In analyses of ISL, specific issues of iconicity (e.g., degree of abstractness, levels of application, competing motivations, and universality) are considered and applied to ISL data. The data…

A notable difference between signed and spoken languages is the use of nonmanual linguistic signals that co-occur with the production of signs. These nonmanual signals involve primarily the face and upper torso and are an important feature of American Sign Language (ASL). They include grammatical markers that indicate syntactic categories such as…

American Sign Language verbs have several ways to indicate time: 1)reference to a specific time; 2) extension at wrist, elbow, or shoulder to indicate future time; 3) flexion at wrist, elbow, or shoulder to indicate past tense. (Author/LMO)

Examines the variety of sign language used in Southern and central Pakistan and Northwestern India, including its grammatical profile, word classes, the relationship between word class and functional slot, the marking of basic syntactic relations, shifters, number systems, types of possession, negation, questions, subordinate clauses, and…

Attempts to formulate an appropriate linguistic generalization for the occurrence of inhibited periodic eyeblinking by fluent American Sign Language (ASL) signers. It is shown that signers' eyeblinks are sensitive to syntactic structure, from which intonational phrases may be derived. (19 references) (MDM)

In this article the linguistic features of three Italian Sign Language (Lingua Italiana dei Segni, or LIS) registers are analyzed focusing on iconic phenomena. Previous treatments of iconicity and motivation in spoken and signed language are discussed. Iconicity is defined as a regular mapping between expressive form and meaning that can be active…

Examines the similarities between British Sign Language and West Indian Creole, both in their social development and structural similarity. Pertinent educational implications are discussed. (EKN)

Replies to issues raised by Bouchard and Dubuisson (B&D) (1995) about American Sign Language (ASL), refuting B&D's assertion that visual-gestural languages are not bound by any universal constraints on word order and reaffirming that ASL is a highly configurational language with a basic underlying syntactic structure as well as an…