This grammar of Kenyan Sign Language (KSL) phonology adds to a sparse literature on the units of categorical form in the world’s sign languages. At the same time, it brings descriptive and theoretical research on sign language phonology into better alignment by systematically evaluating current models of sign language phonology for each of the main parameters – handshape, location, and movement – against the KSL data. This grammar also makes a methodological contribution by using a unique dataset of KSL minimal pairs in the analysis, demonstrating that minimal pairs are not as infrequent in sign languages as previously thought. The main content of the book is found in five chapters on handshape, location, core articulatory movement, manner of movement, and other distinctive features (e.g., orientation, mouth actions). The book also contains two large appendices that document the phonological evidence for each of the 44 handshapes and 37 locations. This book will be a key reference for descriptive and typological studies of sign phonology, as well as a helpful resource for linguists interested in understanding the similarities and differences between current models of sign phonology and identifying promising avenues for future research.

This grammar of Kenyan Sign Language (KSL) phonology adds to a sparse literature on the units of categorical form in the world’s sign languages. At the same time, it brings descriptive and theoretical research on sign language phonology into better alignment by systematically evaluating current models of sign language phonology for each of the main parameters – handshape, location, and movement – against the KSL data. This grammar also makes a methodological contribution by using a unique dataset of KSL minimal pairs in the analysis, demonstrating that minimal pairs are not as infrequent in sign languages as previously thought. The main content of the book is found in five chapters on handshape, location, core articulatory movement, manner of movement, and other distinctive features (e.g., orientation, mouth actions). The book also contains two large appendices that document the phonological evidence for each of the 44 handshapes and 37 locations. This book will be a key reference for descriptive and typological studies of sign phonology, as well as a helpful resource for linguists interested in understanding the similarities and differences between current models of sign phonology and identifying promising avenues for future research.

This volume brings together the latest research from leading scholars on the mental lexicon - the representation of language in the mind/brain at the level of individual words and meaningful sub-word units. In recent years, the study of words as mental objects has grown rapidly across several fields, including linguistics, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, education, and cognitive science. This comprehensive collection spans multiple disciplines, topics, theories, and methods to highlight important advances in the study of the mental lexicon, identify areas of debate, and inspire innovation in the field from present and future generations of scholars. The book is divided into three parts. Part I presents modern linguistic and cognitive theories of how the mind/brain represents words at the phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic levels. This part also discusses broad architectural issues pertaining to the internal organization of the lexicon, the relation between words and concepts, and the role of compositionality. Part II examines how children learn the form and meaning of words in their native language, bridging learner- and environment-driven contributions and taking into account variability across both individual learners and communities. Chapters in the final part explore how the mental lexicon contributes to language use during listening, speaking, and conversation, and includes perspectives from bilingualism, sign languages, and disorders of lexical access and production.

The domain of evaluative morphology is vast and complex, as it requires the combination of morphological, semantic and pragmatic information to be understood. Nevertheless, cross-linguistic studies on spoken languages show that languages share some patterns in the way they encode evaluative features. It follows that investigating evaluative morphology in sign languages (SLs) can enrich the literature and offer new insights. This book provides descriptive and theoretical contributions by considering Italian Sign Language (LIS) as empirical ground of investigation. At the descriptive level, the analysis of corpus and elicited data improves the description of morphological processes in LIS, as well as typological studies on evaluative morphology by adding the patterns of a visuo-gestural language. At the theoretical level, the study shows the benefit of combining different approaches (Generative Linguistics, Linguistic Typology, Cognitive Linguistics) for the exploration of evaluative constructions in SLs, as it allows to identify both modality-specific and modality-independent properties. In sum, this book encourages the readers to rely on different data types, analyses and theoretical perspectives to investigate linguistic phenomena in SLs.

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English in Kenya is a stable post-colonial variety that is used as an inter-ethnic lingua franca in private domains, is the medium of instruction as well as the language spoken in parliament and court rooms. Yet so far no comprehensive research monograph on Kenyan English has been published that surveys its characteristic linguistic features. The present book closes this gap by giving a full description of the characteristic linguistic features of Kenyan English. The book provides an in-depth overview of Kenyan English phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics and also gives a meticulous account of the diachronic evolution of this post-colonial variety.

Adamorobe, a small Akan village in Ghana, has an unusually high incidence of hereditary deafness. As a result, a sign language came into being, Adamorobe Sign Language (AdaSL), which is unrelated to any other sign language described so far and is assumed to be about 200 years old. The present study describes selected aspects of AdaSL, notably phonology, lexicon, the expression of size and shape and the encoding of motion events. A comparison of these aspects with descriptions of other sign languages reveals interesting cross-linguistic differences in the use of iconicity as well as in the use of space and classifier constructions. Data were collected during three periods of fieldwork of nine months in total. Moreover, this study considers to what extent the social setting may influence the development of structural features in sign languages. This investigation nuances the impact the visual-spatial modality has on sign language structure. The book is of interest to scholars of sign linguistics, African linguistics, as well as contact linguistics and Deaf studies.

Although a number of edited collections deal with either the languages of the world or the languages of particular regions or genetic families, only a few cover sign languages or even include a substantial amount of information on them. This handbook provides information on some 38 sign languages, including basic facts about each of the languages, structural aspects, history and culture of the Deaf communities, and history of research. This information will be of interest not just to general audiences, including those who are deaf, but also to linguists and students of linguistics. By providing information on sign languages in a manner accessible to a less specialist audience, this volume fills an important gap in the literature.

Linguists Ceil Lucas, Robert Bayley, Clayton Valli and a host of other researchers have taken the techniques used to study the regional variations in speech (such as saying "hwhich" for "which") and have applied them to American Sign Language. Discover how the same driving social factors affect signs in different regions in Sociolinguistic Variation in American Sign Language.