In this article, we provide an overview of the last twenty years of research on Indigenous sign languages, deaf community sign languages, co-speech gesture, and multimodal communication in the Australian context. From a global perspective, research on sign languages and on the gestures that normally accompany speech has been used as the basis for…

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…

Slovene Sign Language (SZJ) has as yet received little attention from linguists. This article presents some basic facts about SZJ, its history, current status, and a description of the Slovene Sign Language Corpus and Pilot Grammar (SIGNOR) project, which compiled and annotated a representative corpus of SZJ. Finally, selected quantitative data…

The primary goal of this dissertation is to investigate the relationship between Universal Grammar and the properties that Universal Grammar constrains, by investigating how language is created/acquired. The framework proposed in this dissertation provides us with tools for predicting what will and will not appear in linguistic systems of…

Over the past 30-years linguists have been witnessing the birth and evolution of a language, Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua (ISN), in Nicaragua, and have initiated and documented the syntax and grammar of this new language. Research is only beginning to emerge on the implications of ISN on the education of deaf/hard of hearing children in Nicaragua.…

This article focuses on the syntactic level of the grammar of Saudi Arabian Sign Language by exploring some word orders that occur in personal narratives in the language. Word order is one of the main ways in which languages indicate the main syntactic roles of subjects, verbs, and objects; others are verbal agreement and nominal case morphology.…

Discusses personal pronoun morphology in Providence Island Sign Language (PROVISL), specifically (1) indexing, (2) pronominalization, (3) person, (4) number, (5) gender, (6) inclusivity, and (7) case. Comparisons are made with other sign languages and spoken languages. (Author/AM)

An overview of current knowledge about Russian Sign Language (RSL) and its use in Russia today notes that linguistic study of RSL is still in the beginning stages, defines issues that need to be studied, and suggests directions for further research. (28 references) (JL)

Describes a research project intended to develop a description, within a generative model, of British Sign Language grammar, with particular focus on time expressions. (AM)

Reviews research on sign language as an instrument of communication and on the psychological validity of sign language. Examines the production of sign language as compared to oral language, perception in sign language, and studies on the role of memory in sign language. (AM)

This article focuses on word order - the order of constituents in the sentence - as one way in which languages establish the relationship between a verb and its arguments. The spoken languages of the world have been classified into three, major word-order types: SVO, VSO, and SOV. Greenberg' work (1963) on language typology has been a stimulus to…

Presents results of research of the use of simultaneous communication in deaf schools and its accuracy in representing English grammar. (AM)

Based on experimental research, examines the relationship between American Sign Language and French Sign Language, and sociolinguistic variation in both sign languages. (AM)

In this volume, five working papers are presented. "Accessing Contexts with Intonation" (Thorstein Fretheim) discusses the use of intonation as a tool for understanding the context of an utterance, particularly in combination with reference. Examples are offered in Norwegian. In "'Altsa' and 'Nemlig': Two Views of Causality"…

Compares the production of speech and sign: the approaches used in research, the cognitive processes involved, and the output timing mechanism. (AM)