Her research is funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. She was elected Fellow both by the Linguistic Society of America, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She has been the recipient of a number of awards including the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a UCSD Faculty Research Lecture award and a Laurent Clerc Cultural Award for distinguished contributions to the field of deafness. She has published in areas relating to language evolution, culture and genes, comparative sign language structure, reading in deaf children and deaf community history. She is co-author of two books with Tom Humphries of Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture (Harvard University Press, 1988), Inside Deaf Culture (Harvard University Press, 2005) and two sign language textbooks. Berman Endowed Professor of Communication at University of California, San Diego, and Dean of Social Sciences at UCSD. I argue that the differences in type demonstrate that iconicity is co-constitutive of the systems it appears in, and as such sheds additional light on the ways that iconicity and grammar are co-constitutive in the different sign languages of the world.ĬAROL PADDEN is Sanford I. Its iconicity is of a yet different type. Enga Sign is described as an example of “alternate sign languages” because they are used by speakers of a spoken language among each other and are found in in communities that practice speech taboos and avoidance of speech, notably in Central Australia. They too are iconic, but of the written characters themselves, not of their referents. Manual alphabetic systems, or fingerspelling, are found in many but not all sign languages, such as in ASL and sign languages of Europe and Asia. In this talk, I compare iconicity in sign languages to other visual-manual systems that have been described in the research literature. But knowing that sign languages are iconic does not explain how iconicity works in human languages. In our analysis, “plurality” subsumes four primary relationship types - interaction, location, dimension, and composition - and we predict that signs with meanings that encompass these relationships - such as ‘meet’, ‘empty’, ‘large’, or ‘machine’ - will preferentially be two-handed in any sign language.The standard answer to this question is that sign languages are iconic because they can be, as visual-manual systems. We develop the general principle that inherently “plural” concepts are straightforwardly mapped onto our paired human hands, resulting in systematic use of the two hands across sign languages. Comparing four unrelated languages, we demonstrate that the two hands are recruited to encode various relationship types in sign language lexicons. We report results from a Swadesh list comparison, an analysis of semantic patterns among two-handed signs, and a picture-naming task. We argue that accounting for two-handed signs also requires considering meaning as a motivating factor. Traditionally in sign language research, the issue of whether a lexical sign is articulated with one hand or two has been treated as a strictly phonological matter.
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