Abstract
When describing variation at the lexical level in sign languages, researchers often distinguish between phonological and lexical variants, using the following principle: if two signs differ in only one of the major phonological components (handshape, orientation, movement, location), then they are considered phonological variants, otherwise they are considered separate lexemes. We demonstrate that this principle leads to contradictions in some simple and more complex cases of variation. We argue that it is useful to visualize the relations between variants as graphs, and we describe possible networks of variants that can arise using this visualization tool. We further demonstrate that these scenarios in fact arise in the case of variation in color terms and kinship terms in Russian Sign Language (RSL), using a newly created database of lexical variation in RSL. We show that it is possible to develop a set of formal rules that can help distinguish phonological and lexical variation also in the problematic scenarios. However, we argue that it might be a mistake to dismiss the actual patterns of variant relations in order to arrive at the binary lexical vs. phonological variant opposition.
Highlights
Sign languages, like all natural languages, are variable, with variation present at the phonological, lexical, and grammatical levels
VK wrote the manuscript with contributions from the other authors
All authors participated in designing the study, developing data collection, annotation of the database, and analyzing the data
Summary
Like all natural languages, are variable, with variation present at the phonological, lexical, and grammatical levels. The two signs are clearly formally related: they share the handshape, the orientation, the locations, and the type of movement; only the direction of movement is different between the two signs: in FATHER-1 the hand moves from the forehead to the chin, and in FATHER-2 from the chin to the forehead Compare this to the following two RSL signs, expressing the concept of EDUCATOR (the sign for the person working typically at a boarding school for deaf children who is more responsible for the discipline than for education), Figure 2. Even if we accept the validity of the criterion, and settle on a common solution for the additional complications mentioned above, when we analyze the actual possible relations between multiple variant signs used to express the same concept, we are faced with contradictions These contradictions will be the focus of this paper, and the possible scenarios that lead to contradictions are discussed in detail in Section “Problematic scenarios”. Will be in favor of acknowledging that the possible relations between variants go beyond the binary distinction of lexical vs. phonological
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