Lexical Comparison of Signs from Taiwan, Chinese, Japanese, and American Sign Languages: Taking Iconicity into Account Shiou-fen Su and James
نویسندگان
چکیده
Iconicity should be taken into account for the comparison of lexical similarity in sign languages, but it should be excluded for the study of their historical relatedness. Woodward (1978, 1991, 1993) modified Swadesh list by excluding body part signs and pronouns for historical comparison. In addition to body part signs and pronouns, signs with similar iconic motivation are also excluded in this study for historical comparison. The preliminary result shows that Taiwan Sign Language (TSL) and Japanese Sign Language (JSL) can be considered as languages of the same family, while TSL and Chinese Sign Language (CSL) can not. The similarity between TSL and CSL are due to language contact. TSL and American Sign Language (ASL) are least similar. Signs with iconic motivation are prevalent and universal in sign languages. Lexical comparison of sign languages can also be conducted with respect to various types of iconic devices even for historically unrelated languages such as TSL and ASL.
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