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.
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Kimmelman, Vadim
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KUBUS, OKAN, AGNES VILLWOCK, JILL P. MORFORD & CHRISTIAN RATHMANN
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2018. Agreement Verbs in Turkish Sign Language (TİD) from the Perspective of Templatic Morphology. Dilbilim Araştırmaları Dergisi 29:1 ► pp. 51 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
Mirus, Gene, Jami Fisher & Donna Jo Napoli
2012. Taboo expressions in American Sign Language. Lingua 122:9 ► pp. 1004 ff.
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.
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.
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