Motivated phonological templates in Sign Language

2016

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14 pages

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Abstract

A basic design feature of language is duality of patterning, the existence of a meaningless level of elements that combine to create meaningful morphemes and words (Hockett 1960). Although the signs of sign languages have iconic origins, Stokoe (1960) showed that sign languages do have a meaningless level, akin to phonology, setting the stage for much subsequent linguistic research on sign languages at all levels (Sandler and Lillo-Martin 2006). Here we show, following Lepic et al. (2016), that part of the phonological structure across sign languages is often motivated by meaning. Specifically, two-handedness is motivated, as are details of structure in two-handed signs previously believed to be strictly phonological and hence meaningless, such as symmetry, dominance, type of movement, and patterns of contact between the two hands. We further develop a templatic model of sign structure (Sandler 1986, 1989) to reveal which aspects of the phonological form in two-handed signs are ofte...

Figures (14)

Signs are comprised of three major phonological categories: handshape, location, and movement (Stokoe 1960). Like consonants and vowels of spoken languages, each of these major categories consists of a list of features (Liddell and Johnson 1989; Sandler 1989; Brentari 1998). These elements behave phonologically, in the sense that the constraints on their structure and the rules that manipulate them are related to their form and not to meaning. Turning first to contrastiveness, Figure 1 shows minimal pairs in Israeli Sign Language STAT \ 4hntét A. flew neler ce Landerern nlilanr\ handakawn ski owmntemawnt awd f(r lanntkinn

Slightly fewer than half of the signs in vocabularies of sign languages use two hands. Of these, there are two basic types (Battison 1978), called balanced and unbalanced (van der Hulst 1993) among other labels. In balanced signs like MEET in Swedish Sign Language (SSL) (Figure 2), the two hands are configured and move symmetrically, and in unbalanced signs like ESCAPE (Figure 1c) above, the nondominant hand serves as a location/place of articulation, while the dominant hand articulates the movement.

The canonical phonological shape of a sign consists of a single hand configuration that moves from one location to another, to manifest a Location-Movement-Location (LML) monosyllable (Liddell 1984; Liddell and Johnson 1986; Sandler 1986, 1987, 1989). The fingers selected that specify a given hand configuration remain constant across a sign, but their position may change, e.g., from open to closed.

Figure 3: Lexicalized compound in ISL, (a) THINK + (b) STOP = (c) TAKEN-ABACK ("surprised")

Figure 4: ASL sign LOOK-AT (a) citation form and (b) durational form, reproduced with permission from Ursula Bellugi © Here we exemplify a particular type of morphological process that is analyzed as emplatic: temporal aspect morphology, that is, inflections for aspects such as iterative, durational, etc. There are many other types of morphology, as sketched in the previous paragraph, but we present temporal aspect here because it is templatic, as background for the phonological templates that we will propose for two-handed signs in section 3. Originally described for American Sign Language (ASL) by Klima and Bellugi (1979), and developed by Newkirk (1979, 1981), verbs are inflected for aspects such as habitual, durational, continuative, and iterative. They do so, not by added affixes, but by systematically altering he shape and/or rhythm of the sign’s production. The citation form of the sign LOOK-AT and its inflected Durational form are illustrated in Figure 4 (a,b).

Figure 5: Arabic examples of McCarthy's model, (a) kataba and (b) kattaba Since the form of these aspects involves gemination of locations or movements and/or changes in the shape of movement, typically from a straight path to an arc, they may be considered comparable to prosodic morphological templates of Semitic languages as proposed in McCarthy (1979, 1981). In that model, the root consonants are associated with templates that account for gemination by double association of the features of the root consonant to C timing slots. Vowel “melodies” vary roughly according to inflectional class, such as active or passive. If a given form requires gemination of the vowel, its features too are doubly associated to V slots. In McCarthy’s model, each ‘tier’ — the consonantal features tier, the vowel features tier, and the CV tier of prosodic form — has the status of a morpheme. Some examples from standard Arabic are shown in Figure 5 (a,b). We have seen that the canonical form of a sign in sign language is LML (roughly comparable to CVC). Under temporal aspect inflection, the basic features of handshape and location stay the same; movements, like vowels, can change their shapes, creating circles, for example, and the prosodic form is altered through gemination of one or more segments. Templates of the citation form of the ASL sign LOOK-AT and its Durational form are shown in Figure 6a and b.” The model schematized here and throughout this paper is from Sandler (1989), inspired by models of CV phonology (Clements and Keyser 1983), autosegmental phonology (Goldsmith 1976) and prosodic templatic morphology (McCarthy 1979, 1981). Oy, fe ny Ay ae re , fr ST icy i ie 1... 4 ...*g4. gt. & 2. A tt

Figure 6: Templates of (a) Partial citation form of ASL LOOK-AT and (b) association to the Durational form (after Sandler 1990). The movement feature in the Durational template is [arc], and the whole sign is reduplicated.

Figure 7: Association of a verb to the Continuative template in ISL (Sandler 1993)

Figure 8: Underspecified templates for two-handed signs, (a) a two-handed balanced template in the SSL sign MEET and (b) a two-handed unbalanced template in the ISL sign END (templates after Sandler 1989, 1993). Broadly speaking, two-handed signs are either balanced or unbalanced.* Figure 8 (a,b) show representations of these two types of two-handed signs, with examples. Specifically, th representations show that the nondominant hand either acts as a copy of the dominant hand, i balanced signs, or as a place of articulation in unbalanced signs. The details of representation for such signs are different representations in other models of sign language phonology (e.g. Stokoe 1960; Blevins 1993; van der Hulst 1993; Brentari 1998), but in all of these, the element hat are represented are treated as meaningless. We show below that two-handedness is nc random, and briefly describe relationships between form and meaning in two-handed signs following Lepic et al. (2016). It is not only whether a sign is balanced or unbalanced that i motivated; other phonological details such as movement type and contact between the two hand are systematically related to meaning as well. which we illustrate with templates in Section 3.2.

Figure 9: The sign EMPTY in (a) ASL (b) ISL and (c) SSL (from Lepic et al. 2016) sign 1s often semantically motivated, either underlyingly or by inflection (see references above). A recent study by Lepic et al. (2016), on which this section focuses, is a cross-linguistic study on three unrelated sign languages — American Sign Language (ASL), Israeli Sign Language (ISL), and Swedish Sign Language (SSL). The study provides comparative data to support the claim that two-handedness in uninflected signs is neither random nor meaningless phonological structure. The study compares 200 lexical items in the three sign languages and finds that the number of cases in which the same concepts were two handed in all three sign anguages is highly significant: 33%, where random distribution would be 13%. This study finds that, although the two-handed signs for the same concepts are not necessarily identical in form across the three languages, they draw upon a similar kind of iconic mapping, a similar ink between form and meaning. For example, the sign EMPTY is realized in ASL, ISL, and SSL with the non-dominant hand representing a surface or container, and the dominant hand acting upon it, to indicate bareness or lack of content (Figures 9 a-c). As is often the case, the signs are not phonologically identical in the three languages, but the fact that they are two- handed and unbalanced in all three languages is not random. Rather, these aspects of phonological form are motivated by meaning.

The feature [alternating movement] is represented in templates to encode a relationship in which one event/entity follows another repeatedly. For instance, in the ISL sign for NEGOTIATE (Figure 11) the hands represent two lines of communication, and the alternating movement shows that the conversation is going back and forth between the participants.

Figure 11: ISL NEGOTIATE, balanced alternating template 3.4. Motivated contact in balanced and unbalanced signs

Figure 12: SSL END, unbalanced, final-contact template

Figure 13: SSL SEMESTER, unbalanced initial-contact template