This article offers a brief overview of historical linguistics and explores the value of historical "sign" linguistics. The specific focus of the article is on the question of the extent to which the concept of "sign language families" is a legitimate and useful one. It is suggested that although lateral transmission and…

This article discusses the occurrence of voids in the intersection between Hebrew and Israeli Sign Language (ISL). Using Weizman's classification of voids (2010, 2016) in our analysis, we have discovered that languages that employ visual and auditory modalities make use of an additional category of voids: modality-induced voids. Our corpus…

Grammars of signed languages tend to be based on grammars established for written languages, particularly the written language in use in the surrounding hearing community of a sign language. Such grammars presuppose categories of discrete elements which are combined into various sorts of structures. Recent analyses of signed languages go beyond…