A Phonological Grammar Of Kenyan Sign Language

This grammar of Kenyan Sign Language (KSL) phonology adds to a sparse literature on the units of categorical form in the world’s sign languages. At the same time, it brings descriptive and theoretical research on sign language phonology into better alignment by systematically evaluating current models of sign language phonology for each of the main parameters – handshape, location, and movement – against the KSL data. This grammar also makes a methodological contribution by using a unique dataset of KSL minimal pairs in the analysis, demonstrating that minimal pairs are not as infrequent in sign languages as previously thought. The main content of the book is found in five chapters on handshape, location, core articulatory movement, manner of movement, and other distinctive features (e.g., orientation, mouth actions). The book also contains two large appendices that document the phonological evidence for each of the 44 handshapes and 37 locations. This book will be a key reference for descriptive and typological studies of sign phonology, as well as a helpful resource for linguists interested in understanding the similarities and differences between current models of sign phonology and identifying promising avenues for future research.

Kenyan Sign Language (KSL) is a thriving national sign language used by tens of thousands of signers in Kenya, and which emerged out of two deaf schools in western Kenya in the early 1960s. In this thesis, I provide a thorough description and analysis of the basic phonological components of the KSL lexicon used in the southwestern region of Kenya (formerly south Nyanza Province). This phonological grammar of (SoNy)KSL makes contributions in three domains. In the descriptive domain, it provides a thorough report of the basic units in the main phonological parameters; i.e., Handshape (Ch. 4), Location (Ch. 5), and Movement (Ch 6, 7), as well as the evidence for the distinctiveness of each unit. The description for Movement and Location are particularly noteworthy because those parameters have received less attention in sign linguistics in general compared to Handshape. In the methodological domain, the grammar is based on a KSL Lexical Database built for this project, in which over 50 phonetic characteristics of 1,880 non-compound signs were coded. This database is currently one of only a few such richly coded lexical databases of sign languages. In addition, this grammar employs a rigorous approach to determining lexical contrast, which has yielded a separate dataset of 461 minimal pairs (Ch. 3). This dataset is unique in sign linguistics and reveals patterns of lexical contrast that were not previously known--and which have generated new hypotheses about how lexical contrast may be constrained by degrees of visual similarity. Finally, this thesis makes a theoretical contribution by comparing how different models of sign phonology can account for sign types in KSL. By evaluating the explanatory power of the main theories of sign phonology on the basis of specific descriptive data, this thesis gives unique insights into the theoretical validity of these models. It also proposes modifications in some cases, especially with regard to how the Dependency Model (DPM) can account for the representation of movement features and their relationship to the timing tier. In addition, a new movement feature, [dispersed], is described and its implementation worked out in the DPM.

This grammar of Kenyan Sign Language (KSL) phonology adds to a sparse literature on the units of categorical form in the world’s sign languages. At the same time, it brings descriptive and theoretical research on sign language phonology into better alignment by systematically evaluating current models of sign language phonology for each of the main parameters – handshape, location, and movement – against the KSL data. This grammar also makes a methodological contribution by using a unique dataset of KSL minimal pairs in the analysis, demonstrating that minimal pairs are not as infrequent in sign languages as previously thought. The main content of the book is found in five chapters on handshape, location, core articulatory movement, manner of movement, and other distinctive features (e.g., orientation, mouth actions). The book also contains two large appendices that document the phonological evidence for each of the 44 handshapes and 37 locations. This book will be a key reference for descriptive and typological studies of sign phonology, as well as a helpful resource for linguists interested in understanding the similarities and differences between current models of sign phonology and identifying promising avenues for future research.

This volume brings together the latest research from leading scholars on the mental lexicon - the representation of language in the mind/brain at the level of individual words and meaningful sub-word units. In recent years, the study of words as mental objects has grown rapidly across several fields, including linguistics, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, education, and cognitive science. This comprehensive collection spans multiple disciplines, topics, theories, and methods to highlight important advances in the study of the mental lexicon, identify areas of debate, and inspire innovation in the field from present and future generations of scholars. The book is divided into three parts. Part I presents modern linguistic and cognitive theories of how the mind/brain represents words at the phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic levels. This part also discusses broad architectural issues pertaining to the internal organization of the lexicon, the relation between words and concepts, and the role of compositionality. Part II examines how children learn the form and meaning of words in their native language, bridging learner- and environment-driven contributions and taking into account variability across both individual learners and communities. Chapters in the final part explore how the mental lexicon contributes to language use during listening, speaking, and conversation, and includes perspectives from bilingualism, sign languages, and disorders of lexical access and production.

The domain of evaluative morphology is vast and complex, as it requires the combination of morphological, semantic and pragmatic information to be understood. Nevertheless, cross-linguistic studies on spoken languages show that languages share some patterns in the way they encode evaluative features. It follows that investigating evaluative morphology in sign languages (SLs) can enrich the literature and offer new insights. This book provides descriptive and theoretical contributions by considering Italian Sign Language (LIS) as empirical ground of investigation. At the descriptive level, the analysis of corpus and elicited data improves the description of morphological processes in LIS, as well as typological studies on evaluative morphology by adding the patterns of a visuo-gestural language. At the theoretical level, the study shows the benefit of combining different approaches (Generative Linguistics, Linguistic Typology, Cognitive Linguistics) for the exploration of evaluative constructions in SLs, as it allows to identify both modality-specific and modality-independent properties. In sum, this book encourages the readers to rely on different data types, analyses and theoretical perspectives to investigate linguistic phenomena in SLs.

Adamorobe, a small Akan village in Ghana, has an unusually high incidence of hereditary deafness. As a result, a sign language came into being, Adamorobe Sign Language (AdaSL), which is unrelated to any other sign language described so far and is assumed to be about 200 years old. The present study describes selected aspects of AdaSL, notably phonology, lexicon, the expression of size and shape and the encoding of motion events. A comparison of these aspects with descriptions of other sign languages reveals interesting cross-linguistic differences in the use of iconicity as well as in the use of space and classifier constructions. Data were collected during three periods of fieldwork of nine months in total. Moreover, this study considers to what extent the social setting may influence the development of structural features in sign languages. This investigation nuances the impact the visual-spatial modality has on sign language structure. The book is of interest to scholars of sign linguistics, African linguistics, as well as contact linguistics and Deaf studies.

Linguists Ceil Lucas, Robert Bayley, Clayton Valli and a host of other researchers have taken the techniques used to study the regional variations in speech (such as saying "hwhich" for "which") and have applied them to American Sign Language. Discover how the same driving social factors affect signs in different regions in Sociolinguistic Variation in American Sign Language.

Surveys key findings and ideas in sign language phonology, exploring the crucial areas in phonology to which sign language studies has contributed.