Abstract
Sign language lexicons incorporate phonological specifications. Evidence from emerging sign languages suggests that phonological structure emerges gradually in a new language. In this study, we investigate variation in the form of signs across 20 deaf adult signers of Kata Kolok, a sign language that emerged spontaneously in a Balinese village community. Combining methods previously used for sign comparisons, we introduce a new numeric measure of variation. Our nuanced yet comprehensive approach to form variation integrates three levels (iconic motivation, surface realisation, feature differences) and allows for refinement through weighting the variation score by token and signer frequency. We demonstrate that variation in the form of signs appears in different degrees at different levels. Token frequency in a given dataset greatly affects how much variation can surface, suggesting caution in interpreting previous findings. Different sign variants have different scopes of use among the signing population, with some more widely used than others. Both frequency weightings (token and signer) identify dominant sign variants, i.e., sign forms that are produced frequently or by many signers. We argue that variation does not equal the absence of conventionalisation. Indeed, especially in micro-community sign languages, variation may be key to understanding patterns of language emergence.Appendices:  https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/FN4XE
Highlights
Despite being produced and perceived in distinct modalities, signed and spoken languages parallel on all levels of linguistic structure.Much like spoken languages, the lexicons of sign languages are shaped by phonological specifications
The data yielded a total of 1,739 relevant sign variants (151 iconic motivations) to refer to 35 stimuli that entered the analyses
We propose to consider the possibility that variation does not necessarily equal to the absence of conventionalisation
Summary
Despite being produced and perceived in distinct modalities, signed and spoken languages parallel on all levels of linguistic structure.Much like spoken languages, the lexicons of sign languages are shaped by phonological specifications. To-live-in uses a handshape with thumb and index touching and holiday is produced with all fingers extended; holiday is articulated at the ipsilateral side of the mouth and at the contralateral side of the chest. Besides these differences, all other features are shared. The signs for bird in ASL and Turkish Sign Language (TİD) entail iconic mappings based on different sensory images and different schematisation and encoding (Figure 2). The ASL sign selects the sensory image ‘beak’ and maps the signer’s hand to the bird’s beak, articulating it at the mouth to reflect shared structural and functional traits of a bird’s beak and a human’s mouth. The TİD sign selects and schematises the wings of the bird, mapping the wings onto the signer’s arms, with a flapping motion to represent flying
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