American Sign Language shares with spoken languages derivational and inflectional morphological processes, including compounding, reduplication, incorporation, and, arguably, templates. Like spoken languages, ASL also has an extensive nonderivational, noninflectional morphology involving phonological alternation although this is typically more limited. Additionally, ASL frequently associates meaning with individual phonological parameters. This association is atypical of spoken languages. We account for these phenomena by positing “ion-morphs,” which are phonologically incomplete lexical items that bond with other compatible ion-morphs. These ion-morphs draw lexical items into “families” of related signs.
In contrast, ASL makes little, if any, use of concatenative affixation, a morphological mechanism common among spoken languages. We propose that this difference is the result of the comparative slowness of movement of the manual articulators as compared to the speech articulators, as well as the perceptual robustness of the manual articulators to the visual system. The slowness of the manual articulators disfavors concatenative affixation. The perceptual robustness of the manual articulators allows ASL to exploit morphological potential that spoken language can use only at considerable cost.
Bradley, Chuck, Evie A. Malaia, Jeffrey Mark Siskind, Ronnie B. Wilbur & Marcus Perlman
2022. Visual form of ASL verb signs predicts non-signer judgment of transitivity. PLOS ONE 17:2 ► pp. e0262098 ff.
Martinez del Rio, Aurora, Casey Ferrara, Sanghee J. Kim, Emre Hakgüder & Diane Brentari
2022. Identifying the Correlations Between the Semantics and the Phonology of American Sign Language and British Sign Language: A Vector Space Approach. Frontiers in Psychology 13
Fuks, Orit
2021. The distribution of handshapes in the established lexicon of Israeli Sign Language (ISL). Semiotica 2021:242 ► pp. 101 ff.
2018. Correspondances morphologiques entre le français et la langue des signes française :. TIPA. Travaux interdisciplinaires sur la parole et le langage :34
Lepic, Ryan & Corrine Occhino
2018. A Construction Morphology Approach to Sign Language Analysis. In The Construction of Words [Studies in Morphology, 4], ► pp. 141 ff.
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.
Kimmelman, Vadim
2017. Quantifiers in Russian Sign Language. In Handbook of Quantifiers in Natural Language: Volume II [Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, 97], ► pp. 803 ff.
Sandler, Wendy
2017. The Challenge of Sign Language Phonology. Annual Review of Linguistics 3:1 ► pp. 43 ff.
Sandler, Wendy
2018. The Body as Evidence for the Nature of Language. Frontiers in Psychology 9
2022. Redefining Multimodality. Frontiers in Communication 6
Williams, Joshua T. & Sharlene D. Newman
2017. Spoken Language Activation Alters Subsequent Sign Language Activation in L2 Learners of American Sign Language. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 46:1 ► pp. 211 ff.
2012. Taboo expressions in American Sign Language. Lingua 122:9 ► pp. 1004 ff.
Zwitserlood, Inge, Pamela Perniss & Aslı Özyürek
2012. An empirical investigation of expression of multiple entities in Turkish Sign Language (TİD): Considering the effects of modality. Lingua 122:14 ► pp. 1636 ff.
Demey, Eline & Els van der Kooij
2008. Phonological patterns in a dependency model: Allophonic relations grounded in phonetic and iconic motivation. Lingua 118:8 ► pp. 1109 ff.
Johnston, T.
2006. Sign Language: Morphology. In Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics, ► pp. 324 ff.
Sacknovitz, A.
2006. Napoli, Donna Jo (b. 1948). In Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics, ► pp. 443 ff.
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