How do new words arise in a sign language? We present an empirical study of newly formed words in Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT). Five signers were asked to create new forms for known concepts for which word forms exist in NGT. Participants used sequential strategies for word formation,… read more
This paper provides an overview of all the meaningful sub-sign form units (form-meaning units; FMUs) in lexical signs in Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT). We investigated the potential meaning of all form features that were previously established in analyses of NGT form by analyzing their… read more
Abstract (International Sign) Sign languages can be categorized as shared sign languages or deaf community sign languages, depending on the context in which they emerge. It has been suggested that shared sign languages exhibit more variation in the expression of everyday concepts than deaf… read more
This article seeks to explore a prosodic explanation for the frequent occurrence of pointing signs phrase-finally. Corpus data from Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) show that indeed pointing signs occur highly frequently at the end of sentences, and an elicitation study shows that pointing… read more
Mouthings and mouth gestures are omnipresent in Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT). Mouthings in NGT commonly have their origin in spoken Dutch. We conducted a corpus study to explore how frequent mouthings in fact are in NGT, whether there is variation within and between signs in mouthings,… read more
In this paper, we present a comparative study of mouth actions in three European sign languages: British Sign Language (BSL), Nederlandse Gebarentaal (Sign Language of the Netherlands, NGT), and Swedish Sign Language (SSL). We propose a typology for, and report the frequency distribution of, the… read more
This introduction outlines the general theme of this issue of Sign Language & Linguistics: the identification of sentences and sentence boundaries in signed languages. First, several definitions of and perspectives on the unit ‘sentence’ stemming from the linguistic literature are discussed.… read more
This article describes how new technological possibilities allow sign language researchers to share and publish video data and transcriptions online. Both linguistic and technological aspects of creating and publishing a sign language corpus are discussed, and standards are proposed for both… read more
This paper describes the SignPhon database, a tool for phonological research. The history and goal of the project are outlined, and the database is briefly compared to other projects like HamNoSys and SignStream. We present the structure of the database and an overview of the fields that are… read more