Research on narratives in an Australian language demonstrated surprising facts about speakers’ spatial orientation and knowledge both in the insistent use of morphologically hypertrophied spoken directional terminology and in accompanying gestures. Pursuing comparable phenomena in a Mayan… read more
Zincantec Family Homesign (or “Z”) is a first generation sign-language emerging in a single family in Chiapas, Mexico. Despite its very short history Z demonstrates how speakers’ gestures can “jump” into the lexicon of a newly created sign language and become further specialized via processes of… read more
A few years ago I revisited the Hopevale community in North Queensland with the intention of “repatriating” various sorts of materials – mostly photographs and films – from more than forty years of (discontinuous) research among Guugu Yimithirr-speaking people north of Cooktown. Taking as the… read more
A first generation family homesign system, dubbed “Z”, from the Tzotzil-speaking township of Zinacantán, in Chiapas, Mexico, provides insight into how a new sign language can begin to distinguish formally different “part-of-speech” categories. After describing the small signing community,… read more
Kendon’s foundational proposals about the phrasing of gesture are applied to the emerging syntax of the multimodal utterances in “Z,” a first-generation sign language emerging among three deaf siblings and their hearing-age mates in an indigenous Mexican community. I build on the composition and… read more
A first generation family homesign system, dubbed “Z”, from the Tzotzil-speaking township of Zinacantán, in Chiapas, Mexico, provides insight into how a new sign language can begin to distinguish formally different “part-of-speech” categories. After describing the small signing community,… read more