The notion of subject in human language has a privileged status relative to other arguments. This special status is manifested in the behavior of subjects at the morphological, syntactic, semantic and discourse levels. Here we bring evidence that subjects have privileged status at the lexical level as well, by analyzing lexicalization patterns of verbs in three different sign languages. Our ana...

Article history: Received 1 August 2007 Received in revised form 22 May 2009 Accepted 26 May 2009

Complexity has been linked to ease of learning. This article explores the roles of two measures of complexity – feature economy and logical complexity – in the acquisition of sets of signs, taken from a small sign language that serves as an analogue of plosive inventories in spoken language. In a learning experiment, participants acquired data sets that varied in feature economy and logical com...

Sign languages have two strikingly different kinds of morphological structure: sequential and simultaneous. The simultaneous morphology of two unrelated sign languages, American and Israeli Sign Language, is very similar and is largely inflectional, while what little sequential morphology we have found differs significantly and is derivational. We show that at least two pervasive types of infle...

Sign language poetry is the ultimate form of aesthetic signing, in which the form of language used is as important as or even more important than the message. Like so much poetry in any language, sign language poetry is a means of expressing ideas unusually succinctly, through means of heightened "art" language. It uses specific language devices to maximise the significance of the poem, just as...