Semantic Fields in Sign Languages Sign Language Typology 6 Editors Marie Coppola Onno Crasborn Ulrike Zeshan Editorial board Sam Lutalo-Kiingi Irit Meir Ronice Müller de Quadros Nick Palfreyman Roland Pfau Adam Schembri Gladys Tang Erin Wilkinson Jun Hui Yang De Gruyter Mouton · Ishara Press Semantic Fields in Sign Languages Colour, Kinship and Quantification Edited by Ulrike Zeshan Keiko Sagara De Gruyter Mouton · Ishara Press ISBN 978-1-5015-1148-6 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-1-5015-0342-9 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-1-5015-0332-0 ISSN 2192-516X e-ISSN 2192-5178 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2016 Walter de Gruyter Inc., Boston/Berlin and Ishara Press, Lancaster, UK Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com Table of Contents Part 1: Introduction Semantic fields in sign languages – A comparative typological study Keiko Sagara and Ulrike Zeshan ������������������������������������������������������������������3 Part 2: European sign languages Colour terms, kinship terms and numerals in Estonian Sign Language Liivi Hollman ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 41 Colours and Numerals in Spanish Sign Language (LSE) Inmaculada C. Báez-Montero and Ana María Fernández-Soneira ������������73 A typological look at kinship terms, colour terms and numbers in Finnish Sign Language Ritva Takkinen, Tommi Jantunen, and Irja Seilola ����������������������������������� 123 Kinship terminology in Czech Sign Language Klára Richterová, Alena Macurová, and Radka Nováková ����������������������163 Why is the SKY BLUE? On colour signs in Icelandic Sign Language Rannveig Sverrisdóttir and Kristín Lena Thorvaldsdóttir ������������������������209 Part 3: Non-European sign languages Numeral signs and compounding in Chinese Sign Language (CSL) Junhui Yang ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 253 Colour terms in Indonesian sign language varieties: A preliminary study. Nick Palfreyman ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������269 Aspects of number and kinship terms in Japanese Sign Language Keiko Sagara ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������301 Contents Kinship and colour terms in Mexican Sign Language Bernadet Hendriks ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 333 Number, colour and kinship in New Zealand Sign Language Rachel McKee �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������351 Language index ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������385 Subject index ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������389 Part I Introduction Semantic fields in sign languages – A comparative typological study Keiko Sagara and Ulrike Zeshan This volume is the result of a large cross-linguistic study on semantic fields in sign languages. When the study was designed, three main semantic fields were chosen for investigation: colour terms, kinship terms, and quantifica- tion, with the latter focusing on numerals. In this chapter, we cover the back- ground of the study that has led to this volume. This includes information on the rationale for the study and its overall design, a section on the meth- odologies used for the study, and a summary of data we collected. We also summarise some of the generalisations that have emerged from a compara- tive survey of these data for each of the domains. As with previous studies in sign language typology (Zeshan 2006; Zeshan and Perniss 2008), this volume is the result of a project conducted over several years. Our study took place between 2010 and 2014, and in the process, we worked with many collaborators and co-researchers around the world (see Section 3 and Acknowledgements at the end of this chapter). As large-scale studies in sign language typology have developed over the past 10 years since the publication of the first (Zeshan 2006), the array of meth- odological tools and the research context have likewise undergone important developments. This chapter explores some of these issues. 1. Design of the study As pointed out in Palfreyman, Sagara and Zeshan (2014), one of the impor- tant considerations when designing a project in sign language typology is the choice of domain to be investigated. The present project followed a similar rationale as previous work on negatives and interrogatives (Zeshan 2004a, 2004b) and possessive and existential constructions (Zeshan and Perniss 2008) in terms of the characteristics of the research domain. First of all, all three domains are amply documented in spoken language research. Documentation of numerals, in particular cardinal numerals, has an extremely broad coverage across spoken languages (cf. Hammarström 2010), and colour terms have been of interest to spoken language linguists 4 Keiko Sagara and Ulrike Zeshan working on many different languages at least since the publication of the seminal article on the hierarchy of colour terms by Berlin and Kay (1969). Kinship terms have been of interest at the interface between linguistics and ethnography, sometimes being studied in much greater depth than was possible in our sign language data (e.g. Evans 2003 on Australian Aboriginal languages). Reviewing such studies in spoken language linguistics reveals significant linguistic diversity, in particular, the kind of patterned variation that provides interesting generalisations, such as distinguishing between different bases (e.g. Comrie 2013), or delineating a subgroup of basic colour terms (Berlin and Kay 1969). This ground work provided a good level of confidence to expect inter- esting patterned variation across sign languages too. In particular, the lexical sets in these domains tend to involve a significant degree of morphological complexity, in both signed and spoken languages. Conceptually, it makes sense to think of a network of relationships and sub-groupings within any lexicon with regard to these three domains. The structure of a family tree, even as a pre-theoretical notion, lends itself to many possible subdivisions, such as maternal and paternal relations, older and younger generations, etc. Larger numerals are typically constructed out of smaller ones, resulting in sub-sets within numeral paradigms. And any system of colour terms imposes a subdivision on the colour spectrum and has the potential to differentiate linguistically between lighter and darker shades, colour saturation, and the like. Such considerations led to the hypothesis that these three domains would constitute fertile ground for investigating morphological complexity and typological patterns within the lexicon of sign languages, as this is indeed what the project has found overall. Moreover, at least some published sources are available for a range of sign languages in these domains (see a review in Chapter 2 of this volume), and this is an important additional consideration, given that documentary sources on many sign languages are still scarce. Finally, an important consideration has been the viability of data collection from a wide range of genetically and geographically distinct sign languages (see Zeshan and Palfreyman, in press, on this issue). The three domains are central to any person’s daily experience, and therefore, eliciting the requisite vocabulary was going to be much easier than in the case of semantic fields that are less central to everyday human experience, such as temperature (cf. Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2015), or less accessible to immediate conscious recall, such as levels of social hierarchy or politeness phenomena in language, or the functioning of discourse markers (cf. Schiffrin 2001). With a view to collecting data from both linguists and non-linguists, these considerations Semantic fields in sign languages 5 have increased the range of data sources and collaborators that the project was able to access. Throughout the project, continuous efforts were made to gather data on sign languages all over the world, e.g. through mailing lists, the newsletter of the World Federation of the Deaf (WFD), the website of the International Institute for Sign Languages and Deaf Studies (iSLanDS), and emails to specific sign language experts in many countries. Unfortunately due to diffi- culties with technological access in Africa, it has not been possible to gather as much data as we would have liked from African partners and thus the study contains little representation of this continent. However, the representation of diversity, including in developing countries, is significant here and our project includes several rural sign languages, such as Alipur Sign Language in India. In all, the data encompass semantic fields from 33 different sign languages (see full list in Section 3). The study proceeded in three overlapping phases: 1. Recruiting a network of participants as co-researchers, who would work with the core research team on gathering information from their respective sign languages. In parallel, we developed a range of research