Emerging Sign Languages

Emerging Sign Languages

Natural Sign Languages

It has been nearly forty years since serious investigation of natural sign languages began to show that these languages are bona fide linguistic systems, with structures and rules and the full range of expressive power that characterize spoken languages. Researchers have spent most of that time demonstrating, with increasing rigor and formality, the sometimes surprising similarities between lan...

Sign Languages and Compounding

Short abstract Compounding is one of the few sequential word formation processes found across sign languages. We examine the properties of compounds in languages in the visual-gestural modality, showing both similarities to spoken language compounds, as well as a modality-specific type of simultaneous compounding. We also explore the development of compounds in a new sign language, (Al-Sayyid B...

Formal Semantics of Sign Languages

The paper discusses some issues that arise from research on sign languages in the area of formal semantics. Sign languages provide a unique standpoint to investigate semantic phenomena like donkey anaphora, indexical reference shift, and tense. Moreover, they pose a challenge for semantic theories, since movement verbs display gradient properties (semi-continuous variations with semantic import...

Lexical frequency in sign languages.

Measures of lexical frequency presuppose the existence of corpora, but true machine-readable corpora of sign languages (SLs) are only now being created. Lexical frequency ratings for SLs are needed because there has been a heavy reliance on the interpretation of results of psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic experiments in the SL research literature; yet, these experiments have been conducted ...