Sign language lexicon

Having discussed the phonological make-up of signs (i.e, the form), this section will briefly introduce the notion of the sign language lexeme. The sign language lexicon can be divided into a ‘native lexicon’ and a ‘non-native lexicon’ (Brentari & Padden, 2001). The native lexicon comprises all the lexemes that are developed within a particular language, whereas the non-native lexicon consists of lexemes that are borrowed from other sign languages, the surrounding spoken language, or gestures. The native lexicon

26 As in spoken languages, there is variation in the way signs are articulated, caused by sociolinguistic variation, due to influence of the preceding or following sign, or due to ease of articulation (Crasborn & Van der Kooij, 2016).

in turn can be divided into a ‘core lexicon’ (also termed ‘established lexicon’

or ‘frozen lexicon’) and a ‘non-core lexicon’ (also known as ‘productive lexicon’). This distinction is unique to sign languages and relates to their spatial and gestural nature (Costello, Fontinea, Hermann, Sapountzaki &

Sverrisdóttir, 2017).

The lexemes that constitute the core lexicon have an established form, are subject to the phonological rules and constraints described in the previous section, and their form-meaning mapping may be arbitrary or show a greater or lesser degree of iconicity (Johnston & Schembri, 1999; Costello et al., 2017). Signs from the core lexicon are signs that “you would typically expect to see listed in a sign language dictionary” (Fenlon, Cormier &

Brentari, 2017). The NGT signs BROTHER, ALSO and TEACHER in Figures 2.3 and 2.4 are part of the core lexicon.

The non-core lexicon includes two groups of signs: (i) pointing signs and (ii) signs that contain a classifier handshape. Figure 2.5 shows two examples of the latter group. Figure 2.5a depicts two Entity classifier predicates (i.e., both hands represent an entity), and Figure 2.5b shows a sign involving a Handle classifier (the hand depicts how an entity is held or manipulated).

Figure 2.5. Examples of signs containing a classifier handshape, part of the group of non-core signs (photo: Annette Jansen, ©RCSI).

The choice of handshape in these signs varies, depending on the context, hence their membership of the non-core lexicon (Johnston &

Schembri, 1999). The compositional meaning of the construction in Figure 2.5a is something like ‘a flat object approaches a thin, cylinder-shaped object and passes this object’. Due to absence of context, the construction is subject to multiple possible readings (e.g., ‘The car is passing a person’, ‘The boat navigates along the mast of a partly sunken shipwreck’, ‘A sheet of paper is transported along an assembly line along a cylinder-shaped part of the machine’, etc.). When used in a particular context, however, the signs expressed on both hands can take on a specific meaning (for the duration of the text). The handshape of the signer in Figure 2.5b signals that something flat is being held. Again, context is needed to interpret the exact meaning of the sign. In a similar vein, context is needed to disambiguate the meaning of pointing signs, the other subgroup of non-core lexemes. A third category of classifiers are the so-called Size and Shape Specifiers (SASSes), in which a static handshape or the movements of the hand(s) shows or outlines an entity’s size, shape or dimension.

Signs from the non-core lexicon inherently encode information about the spatial placement of a referent or the size and shape of an object. That is, it is impossible to articulate a sign that represents an entity (e.g., a car, a person, a sheet of paper, Figure 2.5a) without encoding information about its orientation and/or location. Likewise, a sign that denotes the handling of an object (Figure 2.5b) inherently carries meaning about the size and shape of the entity that is handled. Non-core signs are characterized by the fact that they may at times violate the phonological constraints found for sign languages.²⁷

Due to their highly variant and context-dependent nature, non-core signs cannot be ‘captured’ in a citation form. This contrasts with signs from the core-lexicon, for which a citation form can be established. The citation form is “the simplest possible form of a lexeme which still identifies it uniquely and which still conveys what is regarded as its core or essential meaning” (Johnston & Schembri, 1999, p. 142). Notably, citation forms are the forms that are commonly included in sign language dictionaries and

27 This is apparent in Figure 5a, in which the constraints on two-handed signs are violated. The construction does neither obey the Symmetry condition (both hands move but the handshapes differ) nor the Dominance condition (the two hands have different handshapes but still, none of them functions as place of articulation).

Nevertheless this is a well-formed construction as it is morphologically complex.

presumably the forms SL2-learners receive when offered decontextualized lexicon lists.

Figure 2.6 provides an overview of the different parts of the lexicon discussed so far, their characteristics, and the interactions between the parts. The figure visualizes that signs from the non-native lexicon can become part of the core lexicon of a language (e.g., the ASL sign COMPUTER has nativized into the core lexicon of NGT, indicated with ①, and it shows a two-way interaction between the core lexicon and the non-core lexicon. The downward arrow ② refers to a process of lexicalization by which non-core signs come to be conventionalized pairings of form and meaning, and thus core lexemes (e.g., the NGT sign MEET), while the upwards arrow ③ makes reference to a process of ‘de-lexicalization’ by which a part of a sign (within a specific discourse context) is reinterpreted as a classifier sign (e.g., the weak hand of the NGT sign WRITE being used as a classifier predicate to denote a sheet of paper or book in the subsequent discourse) (Johnston &

Schembri 1999; Aronoff, Meir, Padden & Sandler, 2003; Cormier, Quinto-Pozos, Sevcikova & Schembri, 2012; but see Lepic, 2019).

In the context of this dissertation, the distinction between non-core signs and core signs is of importance, since signs from both categories participate in the grammatical use of signing space, albeit in different ways.

In the next section, the notion of ‘signing space’ will be presented, followed by an elaboration on the different devices – featuring both core and non-core lexical elements – for spatial modification.

Figure 2.6. Schematic overview of the sign language lexicon (based on Brentari and Padden (2001) and Johnston and Schembri (1999)).