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Formational Units in Sign Languages Sign Language Typology 3 Formational Units in Sign Languages Sign Language Typology 3 Editors Marie Coppola Onno Crasborn Ulrike Zeshan Editorial board Sam Lutalo-Kiingi Irit Meir Ronice Müller de Quadros Roland Pfau Adam Schembri Gladys Tang Erin Wilkinson Jun Hui Yang De Gruyter Mouton · Ishara Press Formational Units in Sign Languages Edited by Rachel Channon Harry van der Hulst De Gruyter Mouton · Ishara Press ISBN 978-1-61451-067-3 e-ISBN 978-1-61451-068-0 ISSN 2192-5186 e-ISSN 2192-5194 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Formational units in sign languages / edited by Rachel Channon and Harry van der Hulst. p. cm. Ϫ (Sign language typology ; 3) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-61451-067-3 (hbk. : alk. paper) 1. Sign language Ϫ Phonology, Comparative. 2. Grammar, Comparative and general Ϫ Phonology, Comparative. I. Channon, Rachel, 1950Ϫ II. Hulst, Harry van der. P117.F68 2011 419Ϫdc23 2011033587 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Ą 2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston and Ishara Press, Nijmegen, The Netherlands Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ϱ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com Contents Introduction: Phonetics, Phonology, Iconicity and Innateness Rachel Channon and Harry van der Hulst ...................................................1 Part I. Observation Marked Hand Configurations in Asian Sign Languages Susan Fischer and Qunhu Gong .................................................................19 The phonetics and phonology of the TİD (Turkish Sign Language) bimanual alphabet Okan Kubus and Annette Hohenberger (University of Hamburg and Middle East Technical University) .......................................................43 Child-directed signing as a linguistic register Ginger Pizer, Richard P. Meier, and Kathleen Shaw Points .......................65 Part II. Experiment Sign language comprehension: Insights from misperceptions of different phonological parameters Robert Adam, Eleni Orfanidou, James M. McQueen, and Gary Morgan ........................................................................................87 Lexical and Articulatory Influences on Phonological Processing in Taiwan Sign Language Jean Ann, James Myers and Jane Tsay .....................................................107 When does a system become phonological? Potential sources of handshape contrast in sign languages Diane Brentari and Petra Eccarius ..........................................................125 A phonological awareness test for deaf children using Brazilian Sign Language Carina Rebello Cruz and Regina Ritter Lamprecht ..................................151 Contents Phonological category resolution in a new Sign Language: A comparative study of handshapes Assaf Israel and Wendy Sandler ................................................................177 American Sign Language Tone and Intonation: A Phonetic Analysis of Eyebrow Properties Traci Weast ................................................................................................203 Part III. Theory Are dynamic features required in signs? Rachel Channon and Harry van der Hulst ...............................................229 A constraint-based account of distributional differences in handshapes Petra Eccarius ..........................................................................................261 ASL Movement Phonemes and Allophones Kathryn L. Hansen ....................................................................................285 Movement types, Repetition, and Feature Organization in Hong Kong Sign Language Joe Mak and Gladys Tang .........................................................................315 Language index .........................................................................................339 Subject index .............................................................................................341 Introduction: Phonetics, Phonology, Iconicity and Innateness1 1. Overview This book is the result of the SignTyp conference at the University of Connecticut in 2008, which was made possible through a grant to us from the National Science Foundation. SignTyp brought together an interna- tional group of researchers primarily, though not exclusively, interested in the phonetics and phonology of sign languages. While most of the chapters are based on their presentations at SignTyp1, they have been anonymously reviewed and substantially rewritten for this volume. The book, like the conference, shows certain interesting trends in the field. The stronger role for iconicity in signed languages as opposed to spoken languages is acknowledged, and iconicity is seen as an explanatory force as opposed to something that has to be explained away. Compared to the early days of the field, when ASL and BSL were much more prominent, many more languages are now being studied. In the book, about 17 languages are discussed, including Asian and Middle Eastern languages, and there were many more at the conference. As in other linguistic fields, there is a growing use of experimental data and databases and corpora of signs. One of the purposes of the conference was to introduce the SignTyp database (also made possible by the same NSF grant) which is now available on the web at http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/signtyp/downloads/ and is used extensively in Channon and van der Hulst’s chapter here. The book focuses on the formational units of signs: handshapes, loca- tions, movements, orientations, and non-manual units. At the descriptive level, the question is which units can or have been distinguished, which leads to theoretical questions as to whether and how these units, in addition to having a phonetic status, function phonologically, and how iconicity affects the phonetics and phonology of signs. The chapters included use a variety of observational, experimental and theoretical approaches to understanding these units. In this introduction, we provide an overview of one perspective on the relationships between phonology, phonetics and iconicity and make some remarks on the possible role of innate factors. The aim here is not to give full arguments for each statement, but to provide a systematic structure for discussion and argument. In what follows, authors mentioned without dates are those included in this volume. 2 Introduction 2. Iconicity/systematicity Two disciplines usually claim to provide explanations of the systematic prop- erties of the form of spoken languages: phonetics and phonology. There is a clear third contender which does not go by a traditional disciplinary name. It is abundantly clear that the form of many signs is ‘motivated’ or ‘explained’ by a mental image of the object or action that is the referent of the sign. Signs thus motivated are said to be iconic. Though iconic motivation is not absent in spoken languages, it plays a much more important role in sign languages because, compared to the acoustic material of speech, the visual medium of signing is more suitable to depict aspects of the world which are significant to a visually oriented species. Before the linguistic study of sign languages began, they were consid- ered to be mimic languages, composed of iconic gestures and borrowings from spoken languages, and therefore non-linguistic, primitive, borrowed, and altogether a less valuable type of language. With their high degree of iconicity, sign languages seemed to contradict the Saussurian ‘arbitrariness’ of the linguistic sign, i.e. the purely conventional relationship between form and meaning. Early linguists, in their work on sign languages, therefore avoided discussion of iconicity and downplayed its significance. Now that the true linguistic nature of sign languages is no longer in debate, it is allow- able to acknowledge that signed and spoken languages, despite deep simi- larities and communicative equivalence, also display differences due to the fact that they draw on different modalities. Therefore, in contrast with earlier neglect, more attention is now being paid to iconicity. Iconicity is a kind of imitation based on imagery. The signer’s hands and body are substituted for entities and actions which are animate or inanimate, abstract or concrete. The imitation is not exact: it can be altered by addi- tions, deletions, geometric transformations (scaling, skewing or rotating), and substance transformations. Iconicity remains in some ways the most difficult system to understand. The status of iconicity in sign languages is far more central than it is in spoken languages, so we are less able to depend on basic understandings achieved in spoken languages which could be transferred to the study of sign languages. An additional problem is that unlike phonetics and phonology which have a role in every sign, iconicity is not involved at all in a sizeable number of signs in every language. Arbitrary signs with historical iconicity only. Almost all signs originate from an iconic gesture, but over time, phonetic and phonological changes make its iconic basis no longer recognizable. Cultural changes can also obscure the Introduction 3 iconicity. An example is the ASL sign GIRL (fist hand strokes the pad of the thumb along the jaw line down toward the chin). Some claim that this sign originated from a representation of the strings of a bonnet. Yet this
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