This article examines sign languages that belong to a complex of indigenous sign languages in Mesoamerica that K'iche'an Maya people of Guatemala refer to collectively as Meemul Tziij. It explains the relationship between the Meemul Tziij variety of the Yukatek Maya village of Chican (state of Yucatan, Mexico) and the hitherto undescribed Meemul…

This article reports on a comparison of lexical items in the vocabulary of Icelandic and Danish sign languages prompted by anecdotal reports of similarity and historical records detailing close contact between the two communities. Drawing on previous studies, including Bickford (2005), McKee and Kennedy (1998, 2000a, 2000b) and Parkhurst and…

Presents a list of classifiers in American Sign Language and describes a study of their semantic characteristics. Classifiers are defined as certain hand shapes in particular orientations that stand for certain semantic features of noun arguments and which may substitute for particular nouns in various semantic environments, thereby functioning as…

The performance of two sign language interpreters in interpreting and transliterating two English texts in 1973 and again in 1985 was analyzed. Both interpreters significantly increased their use of four linguistic features of American Sign Language: classifiers; rhetorical questions; noun-adjective word order; and nonmanual negation. (Author/CB)