Compounding, as a nearly universal word-formation process that is very useful in emerging languages, might be expected to conventionalize early in a language’s history. However, a recent study focusing on novel compounding in ISL and ABSL found that this may not be the case, and moreover, that the two languages appear to differ in how compounding is conventionalizing (Tkachman & Meir 2018). In this paper, we follow up on their findings, using six new measures to further evaluate lexical and structural conventionalization in the same set of novel compounds elicited by Tkachman & Meir (2018). We found that ISL shows more lexical convergence, whereas ABSL shows more structural convergence. We propose that the differences in conventionalization we observe can be linked to the different social circumstances of these languages (Meir et al. 2010).
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Cited by (4)
Cited by four other publications
Lutzenberger, Hannah, Katie Mudd, Rose Stamp & Adam Charles Schembri
2023. The social structure of signing communities and lexical variation: A cross-linguistic comparison of three unrelated sign languages. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 8:1
2022. Shared Context Facilitates Lexical Variation in Sign Language Emergence. Languages 7:1 ► pp. 31 ff.
Lutzenberger, Hannah, Connie de Vos, Onno Crasborn & Paula Fikkert
2021. Formal variation in the Kata Kolok lexicon. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 6:1
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