Many sign languages have semantically related noun-verb pairs, such as ‘hairbrush/brush-hair’, which are similar in form due to iconicity. Researchers studying this phenomenon in sign languages have found that the two are distinguished by subtle differences, for example, in type of movement. Here we investigate two young sign languages, Israeli Sign Language (ISL) and Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL), to determine whether they have developed a reliable distinction in the formation of noun-verb pairs, despite their youth, and, if so, how. These two young language communities differ from each other in terms of heterogeneity within the community, contact with other languages, and size of population. Using methodology we developed for cross-linguistic comparison, we identify reliable formational distinctions between nouns and related verbs in ISL, but not in ABSL, although early tendencies can be discerned. Our results show that a formal distinction in noun-verb pairs in sign languages is not necessarily present from the beginning, but may develop gradually instead. Taken together with comparative analyses of other linguistic phenomena, the results lend support to the hypothesis that certain social factors such as population size, domains of use, and heterogeneity/homogeneity of the community play a role in the emergence of grammar.
Al-Fityani, Kinda & Carol Padden (2010). Sign language geography in the Arab world. In D. Brentari (Ed.), Sign languages: A Cambridge survey (pp. 443–450). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Bender, Emily M. & Dan Flickinger (2005). Rapid prototyping of scalable grammars: Towards modularity in extensions to a grammar-independent core. In
Proceedings of IJCNLP 2005
Companion Volume1, pp. 203–208. Jeju, Korea.
Bernstein, Basil. (1971). Class, codes and control. Vol. 11. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Bickford, J. Albert. (2005). The signed languages of Eastern Europe. SIL Electronic Survey Reports 2005-026: 45. [URL]
Boyes Braem, Penny & Rachel Sutton-Spence (Eds.) (2001). The hands are the head of the mouth: The mouth as articulator in sign languages. Hamburg: Signum.
Broschart, Jürgen. (1997). Why Tongan does it differently?Linguistic Typology, 11, 123–165.
Chomsky, Noam. (1970). Remarks on nominalization. In Roderick A. Jacobs & Peter S. Rosenbaum (Eds.), Readings in English transformational grammar (pp. 184–221). Waltham, MA: Ginn.
Chomsky, Noam. (1993). A minimalist program for linguistic theory. In Kenneth Hale & Samuel Jay Keyser (Eds.), The view from building 20 (pp. 1–52). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam. (1995). The minimalist program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cohen, Einya, Lila Namir, & Izchak M. Schlesinger (1977). A new dictionary of sign language: Employing the Eshkol-Wachmann movement notation system. The Hague: Mouton.
Croft, William. (2000). Parts of speech as language universals and as language-particular categories. In Petra M. Vogel & Bernard Comrie (Eds.), Approaches to the typology of word classes (pp. 65–103). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
de Vos, Connie. (2012). Kata Kolko: An updated sociolinguistic profile. In Ulrike Zeshan & Connie de Vos (Eds.), Sign languages in village communities: Anthropological and linguistic insights (pp. 381–386). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Dotter, Franz & Ingeborg Okorn (2003). Austria’s hidden conflict: Hearing culture versus deaf culture. In Leila Frances Monaghan, Constanze Schmaling, Karen Nakamura, & Graham H. Turner (Eds.), Many ways to be deaf: International variation in deaf communities (pp. 49–66). Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press.
Emmorey, Karen. (2002). Language, cognition, and the brain: Insights from sign language research. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Emmorey, Karen. (Ed.) (2003). Perspectives on classifier constructions in sign languages. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Erlenkamp, Sonja. (2000). Syntaktische Kategorien und lexikalische Klassen: Typologische Aspekte der deutschen Gebärdensprache. München: LINCOM Europa.
Evans, Nicholas. (1995). The grammar of Kayardild. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Evans, Nicholas. (2000). Word classes in the world’s languages. In Geert E. Booij, Christian Lehmann, & Joachim Mugdan (Eds.), Morphologie: Ein internationales Handbuch zur Flexion und Wortbildung / Morphology: International handbook on inflection and word-formation (pp. 708–732). Berlin: de Gruyter.
Gil, David. (1991). Nouns, verbs, and quantification. EUROTYP Working Papers, Series X, No. 1.
Goldin-Meadow, Susan. (2003). The resilience of language: What gesture creation in deaf children can tell us about how all children learn language. New York: Psychology Press.
Groce, Nora E. (1985). Everyone here spoke sign language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Haspelmath, Martin. (2001). Word classes and parts of speech. In Paul B. Baltes & Neil J. Smelser (Eds.), International encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences (Vol. 241, pp. 16538–16545). Amsterdam: Pergamon.
Haspelmath, Martin. (2007). Pre-established categories don’t exist: Consequences for language description and typology. Linguistic Typology, 11 (1), 119–132.
Hay, Jennifer & Laurie Bauer (2007). Phoneme inventory size and population size. Language, 83 (2), 388–400.
Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. (1991). The Philippine challenge to universal grammar. Köln: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft, Universität zu Köln (Arbeitspapier 15, Neue Folge).
Irvine, Judith T. (1979). Formality and informality in communicative events. American Anthropologist, 81 (4), 773–790.
Israel, Assaf & Wendy Sandler (2009). Phonological category resolution: A study of handshapes in younger and older sign languages. In Alexandre Castro Caldas & Ana Mineiro (Eds.), Cadernos de Saúde (Vol. 21, pp. 13–28) (Special Issue: Línguas Gestuais
). Lisbon: Universidade Católica Portuguesa (UCP).
Jacobsen, William H. (1979). Noun and verb in Nootkan. In Barbara S. Efrat (Ed.), The victoria conference on Northwestern languages, Victoria, British Columbia, November 4-5, 1976 (pp. 83–155). Victoria, BC: British Columbia Provincial Museum (
Heritage Record, 4).
Jelinek, Eloise. (1995). Quantification in straits salish. In Emmon Bach, Eloise Jelinek, Angelika Kratzer, & Barbara H. Partee (Eds.), Quantification in natural languages (Vol. 21, pp. 487–540). Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.
Johnson, Robert E. (1991). Sign language, culture and community in a traditional Yucatec Maya village. Sign Language Studies, 731, 461–474.
Johnson, Robert E. (1994) Sign language and the concept of deafness in a traditional Yucatec Mayan village. In Carol J. Erting, Robert C. Johnson, Dotpthy L. Smith, & Bruce D. Snider (Eds.), The deaf way: Perspectives from the international conference on deaf culture (pp. 103–109). Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press.
Johnston, Trevor. (1989). Auslan: The sign language of the Australian deaf community. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Sydney.
Johnston, Trevor. (2001). Nouns and verbs in Australian sign language: An open or shut case?Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 6 (4), 235–257.
Johnston, Trevor & Adam Schembri (2007). Australian sign language (Auslan): An introduction to sign language linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Joos, Martin. (1962). The five clocks. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics.
Kakumasu, Jim. (1968). Urubú Sign Language. International Journal of American Linguistics, 341, 275–281.
Kakumasu, Jim. (1978). Urubú Sign Language. In Donna Jean Umiker-Sebeok & Thomas Albert Sebeok (Eds.), Aboriginal sign languages of the Americas and Australia (Vol. 21, pp. 247–256). New York: Plenum Press.
Kisch, Shifra. (2004). Deaf discourse: Social construction of deafness in a Bedouin community in the Negev. Unpublished MA thesis, Tel-Aviv University.
Kisch, Shifra. (2012). AL-Sayyid: A sociolinguistic sketch. In Ulrike Zeshan & Connie de Vos (Eds.), Sign languages in village communities: Anthropological and linguistic insights (pp. 365–372). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Klima, Edward & Ursula Bellugi (1979). The signs of language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kusters, Annelies. (2012). Adamorobe: A demographic, sociolinguistic, and sociocultural profile. In Ulrike Zeshan & Connie de Vos (Eds.), Sign languages in village communities: Anthropological and linguistic insights (pp. 347–352). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Langacker, Ronald W. (1987). Nouns and verbs. Language, 631, 53–94.
Launey, Michel. (2004). The features of omnipredicativity in Classical Nahuatl.Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung, 57 (1), 49–69.
Le Guen, Olivier. (2012). An exploration in the domain of time: From Yucatec Maya time gestures to Yucatec Maya Sign Language time signs. In Ulrike Zeshan & Connie de Vos (Eds.), Sign languages in village communities: Anthropological and linguistic insights (pp. 209–250). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
MacSweeney, Mairead, Cheryl Capel, Ruth Campbell, & Bencie Woll (2008). The signing brain: The neurobiology of sign language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12 (11), 432–440.
Marsaja, I. Gede. (2008). Desa Kolok: A deaf village and its sign language in Bali, Indonesia. Nijmegen, The Netherlands: Ishara Press.
Meir, Irit. (2010). Iconicity and metaphor: Constraints on metaphorical use of iconic forms. Language, 86 (4), 865–896.
Meir, Irit. (2012). Word classes and word formation. In Roland Pfau, Markus Steinbach, & Bencie Woll (Eds.), Sign language: An international handbook (pp. 77–111). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Meir, Irit, Carol Padden, Mark Aronoff, & Wendy Sandler (2013). Competing iconicities in the structure of languages. Cognitive Linguistics, 24 (2), 309–343.
Meir, Irit, Carol Padden, Mark Aronoff, & Wendy Sandler (to appear). The influence of community on language structure: Evidence from two young sign languages. Linguistic Variation.
Meir, Irit & Wendy Sandler (2008). A language in space: The story of Israeli sign language. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Meir, Irit, Wendy Sandler, Carol Padden, & Mark Aronoff (2010). Emerging sign languages. In Marc Marschark & Patricia Elizabeth Spencer (Eds.), Oxford handbook of deaf studies, language, and education, (Vol. 21, pp. 267–280). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mitchell, Ross E. & Michael A. Karchmer (2004). Chasing the mythical ten percent: Parental Hearing Status of deaf and hard of hearing students in the United States. Sign Language Studies, 4 (2), 138–163.
Newport, Elissa L. & Richard P. Meier (1985). The acquisition of American sign language. In Dan Isaac Slobin (Ed.), The cross-linguistic study of language acquisition (pp. 881–938). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Nonaka, Angela M. (2012). Sociolinguistic sketch of Ban Khor and Ban Khor sign language. In Ulrike Zeshan & Connie de Vos (Eds.), Sign languages in village communities: Anthropological and linguistic insights (pp. 373–376). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Nyst, Victoria. (2007). A descriptive analysis of Adamorobe sign language (Ghana). Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Amsterdam.
Padden, Carol, Irit Meir, Mark Aronoff, & Wendy Sandler (2010). The grammar of space in two new sign languages. In Diane Brentari (Ed.), Sign language: A Cambridge language survey (pp. 570–590). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Payne, Thomas E. A sample grammatical sketch of English. [URL] (retrieved October 25, 2012).
Pettito, Laura Ann & Paula Marentette (1991). Babbling in the manual mode: Evidence for the ontogeny of language. Science, 251 (5000), 1493–1496.
Sandler, Wendy. (1993). Sign language and modularity. Lingua, 89 (4), 315–351.
Sandler, Wendy & Diane Lillo-Martin (2006). Sign language and linguistic universals. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversityPress.
Sandler, Wendy, Irit Meir, Carol Padden, & Mark Aronoff (2005). The emergence of grammar: Systematic structure in a new language.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
, 102 (7), 2661–2665.
Sandler, Wendy, Mark Aronoff, Irit Meir, & Carol Padden (2011). The gradual emergence of phonological form in a new language. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 291, 503–543.
Sapir, Edward. (1921). Language: An introduction to the study of speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.
Schein, Jerome D. (1989). At home among strangers. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press.
Schuit, Joke, Anne Baker, & Roland Pfau (2011). Inuit Sign Language: A contribution to sign language typology. Linguistics in Amsterdam, 41, 1–31.
Senghas, Ann. (2005). Language emergence: Clues from a new Bedouin sign language. Current Biology, 15 (12), 463–465.
Stokoe, William. (1960). Sign language structure: An outline of the visual communication systems of the American deaf (Studies in Linguistics, Occasional Papers, 8). University of Buffalo, Dept. of Anthropology and Linguistics.
Stokoe, William, Dorothy Castorline, & Carl Croneberg (1965). A dictionary of American Sign Language on linguistic principles. Washington, DC: Gallaudet College Press.
Supalla, Ted & Elissa Newport (1978). How many sits in a chair? The derivation of nouns and verbs in American Sign Language. In Patricia Siple (Ed.), Understanding language through sign language research (pp. 91–132). New York: Academic Press.
Taub, Sarah F. (2000). Iconicity in American sign language: Concrete and metaphorical applications. Spatial Cognition and Computation, 21, 31–50.
Tkachman, Oksana. (2012). The basic noun-verb distinction in two young sign languages. Unpublished MA thesis, University of Haifa.
Voghel, Amélie. (2005). Phonologically identical noun-verb pairs in Quebec sign language (LSQ): Form and context. Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics, 251, 68–75.
Washabaugh, William. (1979). Hearing and deaf signers on providence Island. Sign Language Studies, 241, 191–214.
Washabaugh, William. (1986). Five fingers for survival. Ann Arbor, MI: Karoma.
Washabaugh, William, James C. Woodward, & Susan DeSantis (1978). Providence Island sign: A context-dependent language. Anthropological Linguistics, 20 (3), 95–109.
Wilbur, Ronnie B. (2004). Complex predicates involving events, time and aspect: Is this why sign languages look so similar? In Josep Quer (Ed.), Signs of the time: Selected papers from TISLR 2004 (pp. 217–250). Hamburg: Signum Press.
Woodward, James & Angela Nonaka (1997). Report to the Ratchasuda Foundation of findings from a pilot study of Ban Khor sign language. Research Department, Ratchasuda College, Mahidol University at Salaya, Nakhonprathom, Thailand.
Wray, Alison & George W. Grace (2007). The consequences of talking to strangers: Evolutionary corollaries of socio-cultural influences on linguistic form. Lingua, 1171, 543–578.
Zeshan, Ulrike. (2000). Gebärdensprachen des indischen Subkontinents. München: LINCOM Europa.
Zwitserlood, Inge. (2003). Classifying hand configurations in Nederlandse Gebarentaal (Sign language of the Netherlands). PhD. Thesis, Utrecht University: LOT.
Zwitserlood, Inge. (2012). Classifiers. In Roland Pfau, Markus Steinbach, & Bencie Woll (Eds.), Sign language: An international handbook (pp. 158–186). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Cited by (25)
Cited by 25 other publications
Brentari, Diane, Susan Goldin-Meadow, Laura Horton, Ann Senghas & Marie Coppola
2024. The organization of verb meaning in Lengua de Señas Nicaragüense (LSN): Sequential or simultaneous structures?. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 9:1
Ergin, Rabia
2022. Emerging Lexicon for Objects in Central Taurus Sign Language. Languages 7:2 ► pp. 118 ff.
Motamedi, Yasamin, Kathryn Montemurro, Natasha Abner, Molly Flaherty, Simon Kirby & Susan Goldin-Meadow
2022. The Seeds of the Noun–Verb Distinction in the Manual Modality: Improvisation and Interaction in the Emergence of Grammatical Categories. Languages 7:2 ► pp. 95 ff.
Pyers, Jennie E. & Karen Emmorey
2022. The iconic motivation for the morphophonological distinction between noun–verb pairs in American Sign Language does not reflect common human construals of objects and actions. Language and Cognition 14:4 ► pp. 622 ff.
Sandler, Wendy, Carol Padden & Mark Aronoff
2022. Emerging Sign Languages. Languages 7:4 ► pp. 284 ff.
Xu, Lewen, Tao Gong, Lan Shuai & Jun Feng
2022. Significantly different noun-verb distinguishing mechanisms in written Chinese and Chinese sign language: An event-related potential study of bilingual native signers. Frontiers in Neuroscience 16
Tkachman, Oksana, Gracellia Purnomo & Bryan Gick
2021. Repetition Preferences in Two-Handed Balanced Signs: Vestigial Locomotor Central Pattern Generators Shape Sign Language Phonetics and Phonology. Frontiers in Communication 5
Novogrodsky, Rama & Natalia Meir
2020. Age, frequency, and iconicity in early sign language acquisition: Evidence from the Israeli Sign Language MacArthur–Bates Communicative Developmental Inventory. Applied Psycholinguistics 41:4 ► pp. 817 ff.
ORTEGA, GERARDO & ASLI ÖZYÜREK
2020. Types of iconicity and combinatorial strategies distinguish semantic categories in silent gesture across cultures. Language and Cognition 12:1 ► pp. 84 ff.
Motamedi, Yasamin, Marieke Schouwstra, Kenny Smith, Jennifer Culbertson & Simon Kirby
2019. Evolving artificial sign languages in the lab: From improvised gesture to systematic sign. Cognition 192 ► pp. 103964 ff.
Wu, Suwei
2019. The Tool Noun and Tool Verb Alternation in Gesture. Multimodal Communication 8:2
Makaroğlu, Bahtiyar & Selçuk İşsever
2018. Agreement Verbs in Turkish Sign Language (TİD) from the Perspective of Templatic Morphology. Dilbilim Araştırmaları Dergisi 29:1 ► pp. 51 ff.
Meir, Irit & Ariel Cohen
2018. Metaphor in Sign Languages. Frontiers in Psychology 9
Tkachman, Oksana & Irit Meir
2018. Novel compounding and the emergence of structure in two young sign languages. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 3:1
Tsay, Jane S.
2018. Noun-Verb Pairs in Taiwan Sign Language. In Chinese Lexical Semantics [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 11173], ► pp. 3 ff.
Abner, Natasha
2017. Syntactic Categorization in Sign Languages * *I am extremely indebted to all of the individuals who have shared their language and their research with me and with the scientific community. I also thank Carlo Geraci and the editors for valuable feedback and suggestions. Any remaining errors are my own.. In Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science, ► pp. 549 ff.
HWANG, SO-ONE, NOZOMI TOMITA, HOPE MORGAN, RABIA ERGIN, DENIZ İLKBAŞARAN, SHARON SEEGERS, RYAN LEPIC & CAROL PADDEN
2017. Of the body and the hands: patterned iconicity for semantic categories. Language and Cognition 9:4 ► pp. 573 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 2 august 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.