The Lexicon of British Sign Language (BSL), including, and perhaps especially, the productive lexicon, is highly motivated. Many sign linguists in the last few decades have played down the role of iconicity and other types of motivation in signed language. They have suggested that because sign forms and structures conform to rules of linguistic patterning found in spoken languages, motivation and the associated visual encoding must be relatively superficial phenomena. Similarly, they have suggested that the preponderance of productive forms in certain types of sign discourse does not differ from that in spoken languages. The starting point for this discussion is the claim that both the established and the productive lexicons of BSL are largely "motivated." As indicated before, such a claim has been viewed with some skepticism, even anxiety, within the sign linguistics literature generally.