Israeli Sign Research Articles

The emergence of referential shift devices in three young sign languages

Speakers use a range of devices, such as nouns and pronouns, to introduce referents and to indicate a shift between multiple referents. Sign languages also exploit different devices for signalling reference and referential shift. In established sign languages, the hands convey words and proforms, while the face, head, and body also contribute to the reference system, both mimetically and abstractly. Here we investigate how a system of referential shift emerges at different points in the development of young languages with varying socio-linguistic characteristics: Israeli Sign Language (large, heterogeneous, geographically dispersed population), Al-Sayyid Bedouin SL, and Kufr Qassem SL (smaller, homogeneous village/town settings). Early on, signers favor both lexical symbols and mimetic use of the body for shifting reference. Over time, more abstract structures with more simultaneous complexity increase. These factors interact with characteristics of the language community, suggesting a role for the amount and type of interaction in the emergence of reference in language.

Language Contact between Israeli Sign Language and Kufr Qassem Sign Language

Language Contact between Israeli Sign Language and Kufr Qassem Sign Language

Visual foreign accent in an emerging sign language

Abstract In the study of sign language phonology, little attention has been paid to the phonetic detail that distinguishes one sign language from another. We approach this issue by studying the foreign accent of signers of a young sign language – Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) – which is in contact with another sign language in the region, Israeli Sign Language (ISL). By comparing ISL signs and sentences produced by ABSL signers with those of ISL signers, we uncover language particular features at a level of detail typically overlooked in sign language research. For example, within signs we find reduced occlusion (lack of contact), and across phrases there is frequent long distance spreading of the nondominant hand. This novel study of an emerging language in a language contact environment provides a model for comparative sign language phonology, and suggests that a community’s signature accent is part of the evolution of a phonological system.

From a demonstrative to a relative clause marker

Abstract Demonstratives provide an important link between gesture, discourse and grammar due to their communicative function to coordinate the interlocutor’s focus of attention. This underlies their frequent cross-linguistic development into a wide range of function words and morphemes (Diessel 1999). The present study provides evidence for a link between gesture and grammar by tracking diachronic development of a relative clause marker in Israeli Sign Language (ISL) restrictive relative clauses, which starts as a gestural locative pointing sign, and grammaticalizes into a relative pronoun connecting relative and main clauses and agreeing with referent loci, and then into an invariant relativizer. Diachronic changes are inferred from the data collected from three generations of signers. The results reveal that the behavior of demonstratives in the data varied with the signers’ ages according to four diagnostic criteria of grammaticalization (e.g., Hopper & Traugott 2003): increased systematicity, distributional and morphological changes, and phonetic reduction.

Age, frequency, and iconicity in early sign language acquisition: Evidence from the Israeli Sign Language MacArthur–Bates Communicative Developmental Inventory

AbstractThe current study described the development of the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Developmental Inventory (CDI) for Israeli Sign Language (ISL) and investigated the effects of age, sign iconicity, and sign frequency on lexical acquisition of bimodal-bilingual toddlers acquiring ISL. Previous findings bring inconclusive evidence on the role of sign iconicity (the relationship between form and meaning) and sign frequency (how often a word/sign is used in the language) on the acquisition of signs. The ISL-CDI consisted of 563 video clips. Iconicity ratings from 41 sign-naïve Hebrew-speaking adults (Study 1A) and sign frequency ratings from 19 native ISL adult signers (Study 1B) were collected. ISL vocabulary was evaluated in 34 toddlers, native signers (Study 2). Results indicated significant effects of age, strong correlations between parental ISL ratings and ISL size even when age was controlled for, and strong correlations between naturalistic data and ISL-CDI scores, supporting the validity of the ISL-CDI. Moreover, the results revealed effects of iconicity, frequency, and interactions between age and the iconicity and frequency factors, suggesting that both iconicity and frequency are modulated by age. The findings contribute to the field of sign language acquisition and to our understanding of potential factors affecting human language acquisition beyond language modality.

Novel compounding and the emergence of structure in two young sign languages

This paper investigates how structure emerges in a young language, focusing on compounding in two young sign languages, Israeli Sign Language (ISL) and Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL). We focus on novel compounds (tokens invented on the spot) to ensure that we are studying a productive process and to avoid issues contingent with lexicalization. We found that both languages make use both of compounding and size-and-shape classifier constructions (SASS-constructions), but ISL and ABSL have conventionalized different structures and the structures they do use are conventionalized to different degrees. We discuss the similarities and differences of those constructions in ISL and ABSL in the context of structure emergence and language evolution.

Constructing Complexity in a Young Sign Language

A universally acknowledged, core property of language is its complexity, at each level of structure – sounds, words, phrases, clauses, utterances, and higher levels of discourse. How does this complexity originate and develop in a language? We cannot fully answer this question from spoken languages, since they are all thousands of years old or descended from old languages. However, sign languages of deaf communities can arise at any time and provide empirical data for testing hypotheses related to the emergence of language complexity. An added advantage of the signed modality is a correspondence between visible physical articulations and linguistic structures, providing a more transparent view of linguistic complexity and its emergence (Sandler, 2012). These essential characteristics of sign languages allow us to address the issue of emerging complexity by documenting the use of the body for linguistic purposes. We look at three types of discourse relations of increasing complexity motivated by research on spoken languages – additive, symmetric, and asymmetric (Mann and Thompson, 1988; Sanders et al., 1992). Each relation type can connect units at two different levels: within propositions (simpler) and across propositions (more complex).1 We hypothesized that these relations provide a measure for charting the time course of emergence of complexity, from simplest to most complex, in a new sign language. We test this hypothesis on Israeli Sign Language (ISL), a young language, some of whose earliest users are still available for recording. Taking advantage of the unique relation in sign languages between bodily articulations and linguistic form, we study fifteen ISL signers from three generations, and demonstrate that the predictions indeed hold. We also find that younger signers tend to converge on more systematic marking of relations, that they use fewer articulators for a given linguistic function than older signers, and that the form of articulations becomes reduced, as the language matures. Mapping discourse relations to the bodily expression of linguistic components across age groups reveals how simpler, less constrained, and more gesture-like expressions, become language.

The Effect of Presentation Mode and Production Type on Word Memory for Hearing Impaired Signers.

Production effect (PE) is a memory phenomenon referring to better memory for produced (vocalized) than for non-produced (silently read) items. Reading aloud was found to improve verbal memory for normal-hearing individuals, as well as for cochlear implant users, studying visually and aurally presented material. The present study tested the effect of presentation mode (written or signed) and production type (vocalization or signing) on word memory in a group of hearing impaired young adults, sign-language users. A PE paradigm was used, in which participants learned lexical items by two presentation modes, written or signed. We evaluated the efficacy of two types of productions: vocalization and signing, using a free recall test. Twenty hearing-impaired young adults, Israeli sign language (ISL) users, participated in the study, ten individuals who mainly use manual communication (MC) (ISL as a first language), and ten who mainly use total communication (TC). For each condition, we calculated the proportion of study words recalled. A mixed-design analysis of variance was conducted, with learning condition (written-vocalize, written-signed, and manual-signed) and production type (production and no-production) as within-subject variables, and group (MC and TC) as a between-subject variable. Production benefit was documented across all learning conditions, with better memory for produced over non-produced words. Recall rates were higher when learning written words relative to signed words. Production by signing yielded better memory relative to vocalizing. The results are explained in light of the encoding distinctiveness account, namely, the larger the number of unique encoding processes involved at study, the better the memory benefit.

Modality-Induced Voids in the Intersection between Hebrew and Israeli Sign Language

Modality-Induced Voids in the Intersection between Hebrew and Israeli Sign Language

Irit Meir: An Obituary

Irit Meir:An Obituary Wendy Sandler "It is about who we are when we are not rehearsing to be who we are." Don DeLillo, The Body Artist Irit Meir was born in Jerusalem, Israel on August 18, 1957. Her interests and experiences were multi-faceted, but there was a coherent core that radiated throughout her life. Two of Irit's central traits interacted so intimately that they were sometimes indistinguishable from each other: the scientific pursuit of knowledge about the nature of human language, and a profound, instinctive, and empathic engagement with other human beings. After completing her MA in English Linguistics summa cum laude at Hebrew University in the late 1980s, Irit spent a few years in the United States with husband Ronny, enjoying time with their three small daughters. Although she excelled in her studies, spoke several languages, and came from a prominent academic family, Irit didn't immediately find burning interest in a field of study that would justify devoting a career to academic pursuits. That is, until she bumped into sign language. It was a book she came across, What the Hands Reveal about the Brain by Poizner, Klima, and Bellugi, that changed everything. Her first step in what was to become a rich career was to enroll in an American Sign Language course in Los Angeles. Irit and I had previously taken a semantics course together as MA students at Hebrew University, where I had given a student presentation about sign language. Years later now—this was around 1990—newly fascinated with the importance of sign language to the understanding of language generally, and ready to return to Israel with her family, Irit wrote to me, then a junior faculty member at the University of Haifa. She asked if I needed a research assistant. I promptly applied for and received my first research grant ever; Irit joined me [End Page 671] as an RA, soon going on to complete a PhD at Hebrew University, teaching first at Oranim Teachers College, and then landing a faculty position at the University of Haifa. All the while she contributed significantly to the development of the Sign Language Research Lab, on both scientific and human levels, which were never separate for Irit. On the scientific level, Irit confronted central properties of sign languages that illuminate the interaction between the nature of language and the effect (or non-effect) of modality—such as the use of space, iconicity and its interaction with metaphor, and the principles behind the ordering of words within propositions. She endeavored to explain these phenomena rather than simply to name them. In her doctoral work on verb agreement in Israeli Sign Language, Irit noticed that the direction of movement of the hands, and the part of the hand that faced the target, were separable but interacted with one another. She showed that the phenomenon of verb agreement is neither strictly syntactic nor strictly semantic, but is best understood as an interaction of the two: The hands move from source to goal, but they typically face the syntactic object, which could be either source or goal. Adopting the model of lexical conceptual structure proposed by Ray Jackendoff for spoken language, Irit argued that, though the instantiation of verb agreement has modality-specific properties, it can be captured neatly within general theory, and is therefore understood as an explicitly linguistic phenomenon. Sign languages exploit iconicity more than spoken languages do; that is a platitude in our field. But Irit realized that iconicity is a complex phenomenon, and that like other aspects of language, it is subject to constraints. She turned to metaphor, a device exploited extensively by both spoken and signed languages. Unlike typical spoken words, basic signs are inherently made up of iconic components which themselves are often understood metaphorically. Irit investigated the interaction of metaphor and iconicity in sign language, asking whether signs were subject to metaphorical extension in the same way as spoken words. She discovered that signs can be metaphorically extended, but not in the same way as spoken words, and identified the interaction between two kinds of mapping, positing a double mapping constraint. Many signs consist of iconic mapping between the...

Intensifier actions in Israeli Sign Language (ISL) discourse

The study describes certain structural modifications employed on the citation forms of ISL during signing for intensification purposes. In Signed Languages, citation forms are considered relatively immune to modifications. Nine signers signed several scenarios describing some intense quality. The signers used conventional adverbs existing in ISL for intensification purposes. Yet, they also employed idiosyncratic modifications on the formational components of adjectives simultaneously to form realization. These optional modifications enriched the messages conveyed merely by the conventional forms. They show that signers can incorporate gradient modes of expressions directly into the production of the lexical items to communicate more diverse and explicit messages in context. Using a comparative semiotic approach allowed us to describe the synergetic cooperation manifested at the stage of utterance construction between formational elements which were more suited to convey gradient and analog meanings in context and those that were less suited and thus not modified.

The emergence of the phonetic and phonological features in sign language

Sign languages offer a unique and informative perspective on the question of the origin of phonological and phonetic features. Here I review research showing that signs are comprised of distinctive features which can be discretely listed and which are organized hierarchically. In these ways sign language feature systems are comparable to those of spoken language. However, the inventory of features and aspects of their organization, while similar across sign languages, are completely unlike those of spoken languages, calling into question claims about innateness of features for either modality. Studies of a young village sign language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL), demonstrate that phonological structuring is not in evidence at the outset, but rather self-organizes gradually (Sandler et al 2011). However, our new research shows that signature phonetic
 features of ABSL already can be detected when ABSL signers use signs from Israeli Sign Language. This ABSL ‘accent’ points to the existence of phonetic features that may not be distinctive in any sign language but can distinguish one sign language from another, even at an early stage in the history of a language. Taken together, the findings suggest that physiological, cognitive, and social factors are at play in the emergence of
 phonetic and phonological features.

The (non-)random distribution of formational parameters in the established lexicon of Israeli Sign Language (ISL)

The study questions the prevailing opinion that lexemes are the only relevant units conveying meaning in signed language lexicons. Content analysis performed on 560 entries taken randomly from Israeli sign language (ISL) show that the distribution of the formational parameters of the lexical forms is motivated in the core-lexicon by cognitive-perceptual features triggering lexical paradigms: hence, basic units are actually basic signs. The findings thus reject the separation of semantics and phonology in ISL. They suggest that invariant meanings motivate signals in all language and discourse contexts and deepen understanding of the role of iconicity in signed languages.

The noun–verb distinction in two young sign languages

Many sign languages have semantically related noun-verb pairs, such as ‘hairbrush/brush-hair’, which are similar in form due to iconicity. Researchers studying this phenomenon in sign languages have found that the two are distinguished by subtle differences, for example, in type of movement. Here we investigate two young sign languages, Israeli Sign Language (ISL) and Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL), to determine whether they have developed a reliable distinction in the formation of noun-verb pairs, despite their youth, and, if so, how. These two young language communities differ from each other in terms of heterogeneity within the community, contact with other languages, and size of population. Using methodology we developed for cross-linguistic comparison, we identify reliable formational distinctions between nouns and related verbs in ISL, but not in ABSL, although early tendencies can be discerned. Our results show that a formal distinction in noun-verb pairs in sign languages is not necessarily present from the beginning, but may develop gradually instead. Taken together with comparative analyses of other linguistic phenomena, the results lend support to the hypothesis that certain social factors such as population size, domains of use, and heterogeneity/homogeneity of the community play a role in the emergence of grammar.

Gradient and categorically: Handshape's two semiotic dimensions in Israeli Sign Language discourse

The study describes certain structural modifications in handshapes as created by native signers of Israeli Sign Language. Though often iconic, handshapes are deemed categorical (and thus linguistic) meaningful units in Signed Languages. Yet some scholars claim that signers modify handshape structure to represent changes in meaning in a gradient manner. They consider such modifications as an iconic gesture ‘overlay’ on handshapes in discourse. Eight signers were asked to sign several scenarios. Most modified handshape structure to represent changes in size or shape in the contextual representative referent in a gradient manner. These structural modifications enriched the messages conveyed through handshapes in context. They revealed the signers’ awareness of the iconicity of a handshape and its articulatory features. Most of all, they demonstrated, in our holistic point of view, the merger of gradient gestural features within the unit structure rather than the overlay of iconic gestures on discrete units: that handshapes are both gradient and categorical units. The study results thus support the claim that we should abandon the effort to separate gradient-gestures (thus, non-linguistic) from categorical (linguistic) units and develop a more comparative semiotic approach to how different types of features synchronize synergistically at the stage of utterance construction.

Insights into Deaf History

Insights into Deaf History Joseph J. Murray Overcoming the Past, Determining Its Consequences, and Finding Solutions for the Present, edited by Mark Zaurov and Klaus-B. Günther (Seedorf: Signum, 2009, 325 pp., ISBN 978-3-936675-28-3) Mark Zaurov and Klaus-B. Günther’s edited collection, Overcoming the Past, Determining Its Consequences, and Finding Solutions for the Present, originated from papers given at the Sixth Deaf History International conference in Berlin, Germany, in 2006, which attracted participants from twenty-eight countries.1 Deaf History International (DHI), founded in 1991, holds triennial conferences with widespread participation by community historians and Deaf community members.2 Thus situated within this movement of community historians, Overcoming the Past also attracts presentations by professional historians and scholars in Deaf studies. Nearly all of the contributions to the volume deal with twentieth-century Deaf history, and a significant cluster of them focus on the experiences of Deaf people in World War II. Indeed, this focus is a highlight of the volume. The book contains a diverse collection of stories on the Deaf experience in World War II. Douglas Bahl, a longtime community historian, offers biographical capsules of nine of the ten pupils of Berlin’s Israelite Institution for Deaf-Mutes who escaped on a 1939 Kindertransport to Great Britain. The remaining 146 pupils were murdered in Auschwitz and There-sienstadt. This biographical focus can also be found in part of Mark Zaurov’s chapter “Deaf Holokaust,” which covers the experiences of selected Deaf German Jews during the National Socialist period. John A. Hay, a member of DHI’s founding committee, writes of the evacuation of British Deaf schools during World War II, organizing his information geographically with lists of schools and locations [End Page 125] to which the schoolchildren were evacuated. Newby Ely offers a meticulously researched account of the incarceration of Deaf people of Japanese ancestry in the United States during World War II. Ely’s article is the first to examine this topic from a historian’s perspective, and his use of primary sources will be helpful for future research on this important period in U.S. Deaf history. Iris Groschek explains how teaching aims changed at the Hamburg Deaf-Mute Asylum during the National Socialist era to fostering in pupils a sense of “responsibility for the continuation and improvement of the German race.”3 While instilling German values through a special unit of Hitler Youth for Deaf children, called Bann G, schoolteachers were also charged with “convincing parents and the affected pupils about the necessity of sterilization.” Teaching staff debated the eugenic fitness of their charges and gave evidence in a special “Hereditary Health Court” about their former pupils.4 These chapters are supplemented by a collection of photos of Bann G’s activities, which are unfortunately limited by a lack of explanatory text aside from section headings. Two other photo collections, one from the Israelitische Taubstummenanstalt and another from the Finnish Museum of the Deaf, offer much more contextual background for their photos. Mark Zaurov’s chapter on “Deaf Holokaust” presents still photos of different signs for holocaust in the American, Dutch, and German sign languages, as well as a description of the sign shoah in Israeli Sign Language. The visual palette of this volume is further strengthened by full-color photos of paintings in articles by Paul Johnston and Uzi Buzgalo on aspects of Deaf art. Of particular interest to historians of the Deaf experience are transcripts of interviews that Zaurov conducted at the conference, with either a panel or individual Deaf people, on their experiences during World War II. The first panel consisted of an interview with Harald Weickert and Kurt Eisenblätter, two Deaf Germans who related their experiences in residential schools and at home during the war years. The eyewitness accounts of their war experiences from the perspective of Deaf children—the burning of Jewish synagogues, a rabbi being lynched outside his Berlin home, visits to concentration camps where Eisenblätter’s father was held as a political prisoner, and numerous other stories—show that Deaf people were not immune to the excesses of the National Socialist era. The tensions within the general [End Page...

Visual intonation in two sign languages

In a detailed comparison of the intonational systems of two unrelated languages, Israeli Sign Language and American Sign Language, we show certain similarities as well as differences in the distribution of several articulations of different parts of the face and motions of the head. Differences between the two languages are explained on the basis of pragmatic notions related to information structure, such as accessibility and contingency, providing novel evidence that the system is inherently intonational, and only indirectly related to syntax. The study also identifies specific ways in which the physical modality in which language is expressed influences intonational structure.

Segmenting sign language into motor primitives with Bayesian binning.

The endpoint trajectories of human movements fulfill characteristic power laws linking velocity and curvature. The parameters of these power laws typically vary between different segments of longer action sequences. These parameters might thus be exploited for the unsupervised segmentation of actions into movement primitives. For the example of sign language we investigate whether such segments can be identified by Bayesian binning (BB), using a Gaussian observation model whose mean has a polynomial time dependence. We show that this method yields good segmentation and correctly models ground truth kinematics composed of consecutive segments derived from wrist trajectories recorded from users of Israeli Sign Language (ISL). Importantly, polynomial orders between 3 and 5 yield an optimal trade-off between complexity and accuracy of the trajectory approximation, in accordance with the minimum acceleration and minimum jerk models. Comparing the orders of the polynomials best approximating natural kinematics against those needed to fit the power law ground truth data suggests that kinematic properties not compatible with power laws are also not adequately represented by low order polynomials and require higher order polynomials for a good approximation.

Letters to Language

Letters to Language Will Leben Language accepts letters from readers that briefly and succinctly respond to or comment upon either material published previously in the journal or issues deemed of importance to the field. The editor reserves the right to edit letters as needed. Brief replies from relevant parties are included as warranted. Response to Joseph’s discussion note December 31, 2010 To the Editor: In his discussion note in Language 86.4 on the mission of this journal (‘Language and the LSA: A reappraisal’, pp. 806–9, 2010), Brian Joseph notes an opposing view that holds that not many readers pay much attention to articles outside their narrow areas of interest. I can see why someone might think that, but I’d be surprised if this were found to be a general view. Language is the journal I turn to most often for articles and book reviews outside my own area, phonology. When I try to recall Language articles that made a big impression, most happen to fall outside my main areas of interest. An example from 86.4 is Irit Meir’s piece on metaphor and Israeli sign language (‘Iconicity and metaphor: Constraints on metaphorical extension of iconic forms’, pp. 865–96), which I might never have picked up if it hadn’t been in Language. There’s a reason why I turn to Language first for such articles. From past experience I know they’ll be worth reading, thanks to the editorial policies Brian mentions in his note. Maybe having a journal like this will someday be a luxury the LSA or the field can’t afford, but as linguistics becomes more complex, the need for such a journal is likely to become greater. Possibly we pay a price for universal coverage in Language by not always having the latest breaking news in every subfield of linguistics. But I don’t think the journal could have served me better than it has over the forty years I’ve been reading it. [End Page 1] Will Leben [leben@stanford.edu] Copyright © 2011 Linguistic Society of America

Signs of the Time: Selected Papers from TISLR 2004 (review)

Reviewed by: Signs of the Time: Selected Papers from TISLR 2004 Petra Eccarius (bio) Signs of the Time: Selected Papers from TISLR 2004, ed. Josep Quer (Seedorf, Germany: Signum, 2008, 404 pp., paperback with CD Rom, EUR 54.00, ISBN 978-3-936675-22-1) Signs of the Time represents a select number of the eighty-five papers and posters presented at the eighth conference of Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research (TISLR 8), which was held at the University of Barcelona, Spain, in the fall of 2004. Like the conference itself, the book offers a broad sampling of the state of sign language linguistics at that time by dealing with a wide variety of topics and languages. To that end, it includes seventeen chapters (grouped into six main themes) and covers research on at least sixteen different sign languages from around the world. Here I summarize these seventeen chapters (organized by theme) and provide my overall impressions of the book. Phonetics and Phonology The book begins with three chapters that address various aspects of phonetics and phonology. In the first chapter, Mauk, Lindblom, and Meier discuss an experimental study of “undershoot” (the failure to reach a phonetic target) in American Sign Language (ASL) locations as a consequence of various signing speeds and phonetic contexts. Not only do they show that phonetic rate effects are similar in both spoken and signed modalities (despite differences in articulators), but their results also suggest that all phonemic locations are not created equally [End Page 275] with regard to phonetic coarticulation effects (specifically, undershoot), which is similar to what happens across different consonants in spoken languages. Finally, they demonstrate that similar methodologies can be used to study these types of effects in both modalities. In the second chapter, Rozelle presents a comparison of the phonological parameters of handshape and location based on the dictionaries of four unrelated sign languages (ASL, Korean Sign Language [KSL], New Zealand Sign Language [NZSL], and Finnish Sign Language [SVK]). To do this, she uses quantitative methodology, specifically, a combination of statistics and information theory. Her analysis not only shows some potentially universal dependencies between the parameters but also suggests that many of the supposed universals (e.g., the limitation of handshape markedness to locations at the face and neck vs. those on the torso; cf. Battison 1978) are actually language specific and/or typological. She also alludes to other possible dependency relations that could be tested using similar methodology. In the final chapter of this section, Tyrone and Woll offer a case study of a native signer of British Sign Language (BSL) with early-onset Parkinson’s disease. Comparisons with previous literature examined a wide variety of complicating factors (e.g., speech vs. sign, ASL vs. BSL, between stages of the disease/age, medication status, and whether the subject was a native language user). Their results support earlier findings that the primary effect of Parkinson’s on the production of signs is articulatory laxing. In addition, as a contribution to future work, they emphasize the need to consider and/or control for as many factors as possible before making generalizations about the effects of Parkinson’s (or other such diseases). Intonation The next two chapters address the interaction between intonation and grammar. First, Dachikovsky compares the forms of neutral and counterfactual conditionals in Israeli Sign Language (ISL). In this work, she argues for an intonational/pragmatic analysis of the specific nonmanuals that mark these conditionals (e.g., brow raise and eye squint) rather than an exclusively syntactic interpretation. She focuses instead on the general pragmatic functions of these nonmanuals throughout the language. [End Page 276] Next, using Wilbur’s (1994, 2002) analysis of blinks as linguistic markers of intonational/syntactic boundaries as a starting point, Sze analyzes data from Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL) to see whether the same patterns hold true. She finds that Wilbur’s classifications are not adequate to explain all of the blinks found in the HKSL data and proposes a modification of that classification to account for the blinks in her data. She also takes a closer look at the methodological questions involved in the study of blinks (the phases of a blink and...