Abstract
In this chapter, we extend a usage-based theory of Construction Morphology to the analysis of sign language structure, to address two long-standing categorization problems in sign language linguistics. Sign language linguistics traditionally distinguishes monomorphemic core lexical signs from multimorphemic classifier construction signs, based on whether or not a sign form exhibits analyzable morphological structure (“the Core vs. Classifier problem”). In this tradition, core signs are retrieved from the lexicon, while classifier signs are derived productively via grammatical rules. Sign linguists are also accustomed to classifying discrete and listable aspects of sign structure as language, while aspects of signing that exhibit more holism or gradience are considered to be gesture (“the Language vs. Gesture problem”). These categories of core vs. classifier on the one hand and language vs. gesture on the other derive from a shared source: the assumption that linguistic forms are built up from discrete building blocks. Instead, we analyze multimodal usage events in terms of constructions, conventional patterns of meaning and form containing both fixed elements and variable slots and organized in a structured network. We argue that the Construction Morphology approach leads to a uniform analysis of core and classifier signs alike, without resorting to an a priori distinction between language and gesture.
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Notes
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Here we are oversimplifying quite a bit. The “formational parameters” that are most standardly discussed in sign phonology are “handshape”, “movement”, and “location”. However, sign forms also differ according to the relationship between the two hands, including whether one or two hands are used, the orientation of the hand(s) relative to the body, and/or the hands’ orientation relative to each other. Some signs are also canonically formed with certain facial expressions or body postures. Here we focus on “the shape of the hands” (handshape) and “how the hands move” (movement + location) only, for ease of exposition. We refer readers to Sandler and Lillo-Martin (2006) for an accessible and comprehensive overview of sign language phonology and morphology from a generative perspective.
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Sign language linguistics has developed its own idiosyncratic glossing conventions. English words in small-caps indicate single ASL sign forms, as do English multiple words joined by hyphens.
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The rule-list fallacy is part of a larger set of false dichotomies that Langacker (2008: 13) refers to as “exclusionary fallacies”. These fallacies stem from creating predetermined, mutually exclusive alternatives when formulating questions related to categorization or membership.
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The term “lexicalization” in signed language linguistics is typically used in a very restricted sense to refer to the process by which any internally-structured construction, whether classifier constructions, fingerspelled words, or multi-sign phrases, become phonologically reduced and non-compositional. In spoken language linguistics, in contrast, the term lexicalization generally refers to a constellation of processes including routinization, conventionalization, and institutionalization, while formal reduction is only one component of a larger process (e.g., Hohenhaus 2005).
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Bybee (2001; 11) demonstrates that in English, syllabicity is lost in sequences of unstressed schwa + resonant more quickly in more frequent forms such as every or memory. Every is often reduced from three to two or even to one syllable /, /ɛɹi/, as opposed to forms such as mammary or homily, which are less frequent and typically retain three syllables. Such a process, however, does not preclude speakers from recognizing these phonetic variants as belonging to the same lexical construction.
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Evidence for the psychological reality of this non-compositional morphological schema comes from the fact that the signs glossed as a unt and female-c ousin, which are borrowed lexical items from English (known as “initialized signs”, Lepic 2015, Padden 1998, with the underlined letter in the gloss indicating the particular handshape used to form the sign), joined this sign family at the time of their borrowing. Because they also denote “female family members”, these borrowed signs are formed to also be signed near the signer’s chin.
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A more traditional, compositional analysis of the signs in Figs 7 and 8 would be that four morphemes, “chin-female”, “chin-communication”, “chin-negative”, and “chin-eating”, are homophonous independent formatives listed as meaningful morphemes in the lexicon. These formatives are then combined with handshapes and movements, which themselves must also contribute meaning as morphemes, to derive signs compositionally via derivational rules (see the “S-morphs” of Liddell & Johnson 1989 and the “ion-morphs” of Fernald and Napoli 2000). This, once again, is the rule/list fallacy at work. We consider this approach to be problematic because there is no principled way to determine how these formatives combine to create a whole sign without access to the meaning of the whole sign in the first place (a familiar dilemma in morphological analysis, see Blevins 2016 for detailed discussion).
Fig. 7 
A family of ASL signs sharing an aspect of meaning and an aspect of form: signs for “female family members” are conventionally signed at the signer’s chin
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Wilcox and Occhino (2016) refer to this type of representation as a phonological rather than morphological schema. In usage-based accounts, these formal divisions are not central to explanations of grammatical phenomena, so we will not insist that a schema must either be phonological or morphological in nature. Nevertheless, these labels can be useful in a more descriptive sense: a phonological schema can be thought of as an abstraction of a formal pattern among related words, a semantic schema as an abstraction of patterns of meaning among related words, and a morphological schema as a statement about systematic relationships between form and meaning schemas.
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Note that there are still elements of the signal that are not described here: prosody and intonation, widely acknowledged to vary continuously in the vocal signal, thus exhibiting “gestural” properties, even in the spoken modality, are not described in detail here.
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Acknowledgements
We wish to thank Geert Booij, Onno Crasborn, Wendy Sandler, Lynn Hou, and Hope Morgan for their careful and very helpful comments on this chapter. We also wish to acknowledge the input and contributions of Satu Siltaloppi, Stephanie Johnston, and Brennan Terhune-Cotter, as well as the audience members in the “Constructions in Language” session at the 2017 meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, for their thoughtful questions.
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Lepic, R., Occhino, C. (2018). A Construction Morphology Approach to Sign Language Analysis. In: Booij, G. (eds) The Construction of Words. Studies in Morphology, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74394-3_6
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