In this study, the phonological development of hearing L2 learners has been investigated with regard to their ability to identify a sign's aspect structure, both partially and as a whole, and one- vs. two-handed signs. The results were compared to a control group of deaf first language speakers of Swedish sign language. There has previously been a limited number of studies focusing on the identification of signs. For this reason, a task that required no previous knowledge of Swedish Sign Language or linguistics was created for this study. The study is based on data from a quantitative and longitudinal investigation. In the identification of aspects, it is shown that place of articulation was the easiest to identify for both groups, followed by articulator, and lastly articulation, which was the most difficult to identify correctly. The L2 group performed better and could identify a higher number of correct lexical signs than the L1 group. However, both groups scored low results. A possible reason for this is that the test template is not explicit enough about articulation as a aspect. When identifying one- and two-handed signs, it is shown that one-handed signs are easier to identify than two-handed signs, across both groups. This corroborates previous research that shows that two-handed signs are phonologically and cognitively more complex than one-handed signs. Further research with a larger number of participants is encouraged in order to investigate other potentially influencing factors.

AS HEARING PEOPLE with sign language skills, we are used to answering questions as to why we know sign language. We all have a story to tell, some with surprising coincidences. One of my favorite examples is the young woman who wanted to register for an evening course in guitar playing. The course was fully subscribed, and it was suggested that she take a course in sign language instead. It was the beginning of a professional career as a sign language interpreter. Here is the beginning of my story.

It is not entirely clear when it began. It probably happened back in my hometown, when I was a high school student and spent many afternoons at a café where three deaf, signing men used to meet.

An important episode in my story occurred when I was a student in linguistics and took a course in psycholinguistics (spring 1971). The course coordinator, Inger Ahlgren, arranged a study visit to the school for deaf and hard of hearing children in Stockholm, the Manilla School. We were informed by the headmistress, Rut Madebrink, that sign language was not used in communication with the students. Since I knew that deaf people used sign language, it did not make sense. I could not understand why deaf children were denied access to the language used by deaf adult people. Instead of being approached with a language they had the ability to perceive, deaf children were left to look at the mouths of people whose speech sounds they could not [End Page 474] hear. I found it unbelievably cruel and felt like being thrown back to the Middle Ages.

Later, I learned that The Swedish National Association of the Deaf (henceforth SDR) had since the early twentieth century advocated the use of sign language in deaf education. This work was intensified in the 1970s and began with a conference to which educational authorities and the parents' organization Döva barns målsmän (Guardians of Deaf Children) were invited. An important outcome of this meeting was that for the first time, the deaf organization managed to reach out to parents of deaf and hard of hearing children and that cooperation between the two organizations was initiated. This was a huge success for SDR, whose opposition to the oral policy of the National Board of Education, Skolöverstyrelsen (henceforth SÖ), was now shared with the parents' organization.

The third semester of my studies in linguistics (autumn 1971) included writing a bachelor's thesis. At the first seminar, Professor Bengt Sigurd suggested possible topics, one of which was sign language. My hand flew up in the air. I knew right away it was my topic. I was prepared to fight for it, but no one else seemed to be interested.

The present thesis consists of six studies in Swedish Sign Language, the primary language of the Swedish deaf community. Unlike spoken language, which is vocal-auditive with respect to manner of production and perception, signed language is gestural-visual. Due to the differences in modality signed language - in addition to being linear and arbitrary - is also characterized by properties such as simultaneity, spatiality and iconicity. This applies to the sign as well as the sentence.

One paper deals with classification of signs. According to the relation between the form of the sign and the referent, signs are classified as either arbitrary or motivated, the latter type consisting of deictic and iconic forms. Further subclassification is made with reference to the role of the articulation (movement) of the sign which may depict a shape, a movement or a relation. This model also distinguishes between direct and indirect motivation. Indirectly motivated forms are related to the referent via a base concept as in ELEPHANT in which the form depicts the shape of a trunk.

Another aspect of sign formation is described in a paper dealing with five morphological processes: A preliminary analysis suggests that these formational changes, when operating on verbal and adjectival predicates, are modulations for aspect, reciprocity and degree.

Two studies deal with syntactic processes. One focusses on iconic and arbitrary use of space in localisation, i. e. how and where the referents of the arguments are assigned positions in front of the signer's body. The case is pleaded for the necessity of using motivational criteria when describing sign classes with respect to direct and indirect localisation of signs.

The second syntactic study describes non-manual grammatical signals marking different types of sentences such as yes/no-questions, wh-questions, negated and conditional sentences.

Two systems for transcribing sign language are introduced: one system for transcription of the manually produced component of the sign; and one for transcribing whole utterances including information on non-manual articulators (body, head, mouth, eyes, eye-brows).

Scandinavia is the name of the three independent countries Denmark, Norway and Sweden; the term “the Nordic countries” includes also Finland and Iceland. The histories of these five countries are interwoven politically, linguistically and culturally with relations also to Greenland and the Faeroe Islands. As the present volume includes chapters with analyses of Danish Sign Language, Finnish Sign Language and Swedish Sign Language, the focus in this chapter will be on these three languages. But Danish Sign Language has influenced the sign languages used in Norway, Iceland, Greenland and the Faeroe Islands, so we will briefly sketch the role of Danish Sign Language in these other countries and regions at the end of the section on Danish Sign Language.

The Nordic Council for the Deaf was founded in 1907. One of its original aims was to create a common Nordic sign language, an aim that led to the compilation of the first sign dictionary in Finland (Hoyer 2005) and the second sign dictionary in Denmark. Discussions about common Nordic signs continued at the Nordic congresses for the deaf up through the century (Hoyer 2005), and as late as 1979 a sign dictionary was published in Denmark with some of the signs marked with an “N,” indicating that these signs were new and agreed upon by the Nordic deaf associations (Plum et al. 1979). However, these normative endeavors were not continued and were criticized not the least by deaf people themselves (Hoyer 2005).

The purpose of the interlingual index is to link the lexical resources of the sign languages of the project. This is the final project release of the index, which covers both the core sign languages of the project as well as additional sign languages.

Computational linguistic approaches to sign languages could benefit from investigating how complexity influences structure. We investigate whether morphological complexity has an effect on the order of Verb (V) and Object (O) in Swedish Sign Language (SSL), on the basis of elicited data from five Deaf signers. We find a significant difference in the distribution of the orderings OV vs. VO, based on an analysis of morphological weight. While morphologically heavy verbs exhibit a general preference for OV, humanness seems to affect the ordering in the opposite direction, with [+human] Objects pushing towards a preference for VO.

In this project, we describe the development of the Swedish Sign Language online dictionary for including CEFR level evaluations of the example sentences. This is done in order to support L2 learners at different stages of proficiency and facilitate sign language teaching. For the students in the BA program for sign language and interpreting, the dictionary is used as a digital tool for searching and finding signs and sentences. In connection to this, we found that there was a need to adapt the sentences to different levels of proficiency, following the CEFR-based scale from A1 to B2. The focus on levels A1 to B2 is motivated by the levels reached within the 2-year program. As far as we are aware, no other sign language lexical database has applied this method – nor is there much international research pertaining to this – and as such this is a novel model.

Syftet med studien är att undersöka vilka handformer som är vanligast förekommande i polysyntetiska tecken i svenskt teckenspråk. Studien, som är den första i sitt slag, fokuserar på polysyntetiska tecken som betecknar rörelsesituationerna befintlighet, förflyttning, stationär rörelse och stillastående. Polysyntetiska tecken har tre manuella aspekter precis som fasta tecken (lexikala tecken). Medan de fasta tecknens manuella aspekter bär ingen egen betydelse, så är dessa aspekter betydelsebärande hos polysyntetiska tecken. Den betydelsebärande delen handform kallas för klassifikator, och har underkategorierna icke-agentiv och agentiv klassifikator. I studien har förekomster av handformer delats upp i tre kategorier enligt vilken den typ av korrelat som klassifikatorerna har: Direkt korrelat, indirekt korrelat och utan korrelat. Materialet som har använts till studien är fyrtioen annoterade texter på svenskt teckenspråk från Svensk teckenspråkskorpus. Totalt hittades 242 förekomster av polysyntetiska tecken som kategoriserades utifrån klassifikatorer. Icke-agentiva klassifikatorer är vanligast, 191 förekomster, där de tre vanligast förekommande handformerna är dubbelkroken, sprethanden och pekfingret. De vanligast förekommande rörelsesituationerna med icke-agentiva klassifikatorer är egenförflyttning och befintlighet. För agentiva klassifikatorer hittades 51 förekomster, där de tre vanligast förekommande handformerna är A-handen, S-handen och knutna handen. Här är rörelsesituationen objektförflyttning den mest frekvent förekommande. Resultatet kan förhoppningsvis påverka synen på vilka handformer som främst bör ingå i undervisningen för nybörjare i teckenspråk.

Traditionellt har tempusböjning och person-/numeruskongruens på verb varit de starkaste kriterierna för finithet. Det har dock visat sig vara svårapplicerade kriterier för många språk och finithet på satsnivå – huruvida en sats är självständig eller ej – har blivit en viktig fråga för definitionen.

Uppsatsen syftar till att beskriva och analysera finithetsfenomenet utifrån språket trumaí.

Det tycks finnas flera fenomen som är tecken på en finithetsdistinktion i trumaí, framför allt -n/-e-klitikan som markerar 3Abs på verbet vid absolutivargumentets frånvaro, samt FT-partiklarna som har en tempusfunktion. För imperativ verkar det vara så att imperativpartiklarna har en intern distribution baserad på person och animathet hos absolutivargumentet, vilket kan tolkas som att det finns en argumentkongruens frikopplad från den semantiska inkorporeringen av andraperson som subjekt. Gällande finithet på satsnivå finns det i trumaí både finita och infinita satser som kan fungera som bisatser. I strukturer där verbet beter sig prototypiskt är satsen finit, medan andra strukturers verb tycks ha rört sig mot att bete sig nominellt, varpå satsen fungerar annorlunda och är infinit.

This paper investigates the domain of name signs (i.e., signs used as personal names) in the Swedish Sign Language (SSL) community. The data are based on responses from an online questionnaire, in which Deaf, hard of hearing, and hearing participants answered questions about the nature of their name signs. The collected questionnaire data comprise 737 name signs, distributed across five main types and 24 subtypes of name signs, following the categorization of previous work on SSL. Signs are grouped according to sociolinguistic variables such as age, gender, and identity (e.g., Deaf or hearing), as well as the relationship between name giver and named (e.g., family or friends). The results show that name signs are assigned at different ages between the groups, such that children of Deaf parents are named earlier than other groups, and that Deaf and hard of hearing individuals are normally named during their school years. It is found that the distribution of name sign types is significantly different between females and males, with females more often having signs denoting physical appearance, whereas males have signs related to personality/behavior. Furthermore, it is shown that the distribution of sign types has changed over time, with appearance signs losing ground to personality/behavior signs – most clearly for Deaf females. Finally, there is a marginally significant difference in the distribution of sign types based on whether or not the name giver was Deaf. The study is the first to investigate name signs and naming customs in the SSL community statistically – synchronically and diachronically – and one of the few to do so for any sign language.

In this paper, we investigate frequency and duration of signs and parts of speech in Swedish Sign Language (SSL) using the SSL Corpus. The duration of signs is correlated with frequency, with high-frequency items having shorter duration than low-frequency items. Similarly, function words (e.g. pronouns) have shorter duration than content words (e.g. nouns). In compounds, forms annotated as reduced display shorter duration. Fingerspelling duration correlates with word length of corresponding Swedish words, and frequency and word length play a role in the lexicalization of fingerspellings. The sign distribution in the SSL Corpus shows a great deal of cross-linguistic similarity with other sign languages in terms of which signs appear as high-frequency items, and which categories of signs are distributed across text types (e.g. conversation vs. narrative). We find a correlation between an increase in age and longer mean sign duration, but see no significant difference in sign duration between genders.

We investigate transitivity prominence of verbs across signed and spoken languages, based on data from both valency dictionaries and corpora. Our methodology relies on the assumption that dictionary data and corpus-based measures of transitivity are comparable, and we find evidence in support of this through the direct comparison of these two types of data across several spoken languages. For the signed modality, we measure the transitivity prominence of verbs in five sign languages based on corpus data and compare the results to the transitivity prominence hierarchy for spoken languages reported in Haspelmath (2015). For each sign language, we create a hierarchy for 12 verb meanings based on the proportion of overt direct objects per verb meaning. We use these hierarchies to calculate correlations between languages – both signed and spoken – and find positive correlations between transitivity hierarchies. Additional findings of this study include the observation that locative arguments seem to behave differently than direct objects judging by our measures of transitivity, and that relatedness among sign languages does not straightforwardly imply similarityin transitivity hierarchies. We conclude that our findings provide support for a modality-independent, semantic basis of transitivity.

The idea of transitivity as a scalar phenomenon is well known (e.g., Hopper & Thompson 1980; Tsunoda 1985; Haspelmath 2015). However, as with most areas of linguistic study, it has been almost exclusively studied with a focus on spoken languages. A rare exception to this is Kimmelman (2016), who investigates transitivity in Russian Sign Language (RSL) on the basis of corpus data. Kimmelman attempts to establish a transitivity prominence hierarchy of RSL verbs, and compares this ranking to the verb meanings found in the ValPal database (Hartmann, Haspelmath & Bradley 2013). He arrives at the conclusion that using the frequency of overt objects in corpus data is a successful measure of transitivity prominence, and that the prominence ranking of RSL verbs correlate with that found for spoken languages in Haspelmath (2015). In this paper, we expand on these intra- and cross-modal comparisons of transitivity prominence by introducing four other sign languages to the sample: Finnish Sign Language (FinSL), Swedish Sign Language (SSL), Sign Language to the Netherlands (NGT), and German Sign Language (DGS). FinSL and SSL are known to be historically related (cf. Bergman & Engberg-Pedersen 2010), while the other are not related, which allows us to look at both modality and relatedness effects in our sample. Of the 80 core verb meanings in the ValPal database, Kimmelman (2016) included the 25 most frequent verbs in his corpus. For our study, we have annotated all occurrences of these 25 verb meanings in a subset of the corpora of FinSL (2h 40min; 18,446 tokens), SSL (2h 5min; 16,724 tokens), NGT (≈80,000 tokens), and DGS (≈58,000 tokens). We annotate whether a verb occurs with an overt object as well as the type of object (direct, indirect, clausal, or a locative). Looking at the ValPal verb meanings with ≥5 sign tokens in all four new languages, we arrive at 12 verbs that are found in all five sign languages and the spoken languages (SpL) of the ValPal database – see Table 1. In Table 1, we see that there is a general agreement across languages – both signed and spoken – in how transitivity prominent a verb meaning is. Spearman’s rank correlation shows a significant (p<0.05) correlation between all possible pairs except SSL–SpL (p=0.091) and SSL– RSL (p=0.074), corroborating Kimmelman’s finding that there are patterns of transitivity prominence present across languages and modalities. It is interesting that SSL thus diverges from the other sign languages in this sample: this deserves further investigation. We also wanted to investigate the transitivity prominence as a property of individual languages. In order to do so, we took the individual languages of the ValPal database and measured each verb meaning in each language with regard to its transitivity prominence. This meant calculating how many of the verb forms associated with a specific verb meaning took a P argument. Note that this is quite different from calculating transitivity prominence based on corpus data: with corpora, we calculated the proportion of verbal tokens occurring with an overt object, and with the ValPal database, we calculated the proportion of transitive verb associated with a particular concept. We included the 12 verb meanings found across all languages (the five sign languages and 33 spoken languages). We then calculated mean distances across verb meanings and languages, and plotted this with multidimensional scaling in Figure 1. In the figure, we see that the five sign languages form a part of a cluster, suggesting either modality-based similarities, or similarities that come with the difference in data (corpus data rather than lexical data). On the other hand, sign languages as a group are not clearly opposed to spoken languages as a group, which implies that the corpus-based and lexical calculations of transitivity are comparable. Interestingly, FinSL and SSL are not more strongly associated than the other sign languages, which implies that their historical relatedness is not directly relevant to transitivity. In our presentation, we will present the results and the conclusions in more detail, as well as discuss the possibilities of using corpus data to establish valency patterns for languages in the signed modality.

Sign languages make use of paired articulators (the two hands), hence manual signs may be either one- or two-handed. Although two-handedness has previously been regarded a purely formal feature, studies have argued morphologically two-handed forms are associated with some types of inflectional plurality. Moreover, recent studies across sign languages have demonstrated that even lexically two-handed signs share certain semantic properties. In this study, we investigate lexically plural concepts in ten different sign languages, distributed across five sign language families, and demonstrate that such concepts are preferentially represented with two-handed forms, across all the languages in our sample. We argue that this is because the signed modality with its paired articulators enables the languages to iconically represent conceptually plural meanings.

This paper deals with the possibility of conducting syntactic segmentation of the Swedish Sign Language Corpus (SSLC) on the basisof the visual cues from both manual and nonmanual signals. The SSLC currently features segmentation on the lexical level only, whichis why the need for a linguistically valid segmentation on e.g. the clausal level would be very useful for corpus-based studies on thegrammatical structure of Swedish Sign Language (SSL). An experiment was carried out letting seven Deaf signers of SSL each segmenttwo short texts (one narrative and one dialogue) using ELAN, based on the visual cues they perceived as boundaries. This was latercompared to the linguistic analysis done by a language expert (also a Deaf signer of SSL), who segmented the same texts into whatwas considered syntactic clausal units. Furthermore, these segmentation procedures were compared to the segmentation done for theSwedish translations also found in the SSLC. The results show that though the visual and syntactic segmentations overlap in manycases, especially when a number of cues coincide, the visual segmentation is not consistent enough to be used as a means of segmentingsyntactic units in the SSLC.

This paper describes on-going work on extending the annotation of the Swedish Sign Language Corpus (SSLC) with a level of syntactic structure. The basic annotation of SSLC in ELAN consists of six tiers: four for sign glosses (two tiers for each signer; one for each of a signer’s hands), and two for written Swedish translations (one for each signer). In an additional step by Östling et al. (2015), all ¨ glosses of the corpus have been further annotated for parts of speech. Building on the previous steps, we are now developing annotation of clause structure for the corpus, based on meaning and form. We define a clause as a unit in which a predicate asserts something about one or more elements (the arguments). The predicate can be a (possibly serial) verbal or nominal. In addition to predicates and their arguments, criteria for delineating clauses include non-manual features such as body posture, head movement and eye gaze. The goal of this work is to arrive at two additional annotation tier types in the SSLC: one in which the sign language texts are segmented into clauses, and the other in which the individual signs are annotated for their argument types.

In this paper, we describe a method for mapping the phonological feature location of Swedish Sign Language (SSL) signs to the meanings in the Swedish semantic dictionary SALDO. By doing so, we observe clear differences in the distribution of meanings associated with different locations on the body. The prominence of certain locations for specific meanings clearly point to iconic mappings between form and meaning in the lexicon of SSL, which pinpoints modalityspecific properties of the visual modality.

In this paper, we discuss the possibilities for mining lexical variation data across (potential) lects in Swedish Sign Language (SSL). The data come from the SSL Corpus (SSLC), a continuously expanding corpus of SSL, its latest release containing 43 307 annotated sign tokens, distributed over 42 signers and 75 time-aligned video and annotation files. After extracting the raw data from the SSLC annotation files, we created a database for investigating lexical distribution/variation across three possible lects, by merging the raw data with an external metadata file, containing information about the age, gender, and regional background of each of the 42 signers in the corpus. We go on to present a first version of an easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI) that can be used as a tool for investigating lexical variation across different lects, and demonstrate a few interesting finds. This tool makes it easier for researchers and non-researchers alike to have the corpus frequencies for individual signs visualized in an instant, and the tool can easily be updated with future expansions of the SSLC.

Although the significance of gender and disability issues has graduallyincreased in the global society during the past three decades,there are only few studies with regard to the deaf community andsport. This article examines the level of Deaf or Hard-of-Hearingwomen’s participation in sports and the factors for their continuedunderrepresentation. The WomenSport International’s Task Force onDeaf and Hard of Hearing Girls and Women in Sport conducted aworld-wide survey to determine and assess the needs of deaf andhard of hearing girls and women in sport. A snapshot of the resultsand issues and future aspirations are provided.

In this paper, we present a comparative study of mouth actions in three European sign languages: British Sign Language (BSL), Nederlandse Gebarentaal (Sign Language of the Netherlands, NGT), and Swedish Sign Language (SSL). We propose a typology for, and report the frequency distribution of, the different types of mouth actions observed. In accordance with previous studies, we find the three languages remarkably similar — both in the types of mouth actions they use, and in how these mouth actions are distributed. We then describe how mouth actions can extend over more than one manual sign. This spreading of mouth actions is the primary focus of this paper. Based on an analysis of comparable narrative material in the three languages, we demonstrate that the direction as well as the source and goal of spreading may be language-specific.

This article describes how new technological possibilities allow sign language researchers to share and publish video data and transcriptions online. Both linguistic and technological aspects of creating and publishing a sign language corpus are discussed, and standards are proposed for both metadata and transcription categories specific to sign language data. In addition, ethical aspects of publishing video data of signers online are considered, and suggestions are offered for future corpus projects and software tools.

This paper provides the first contrastive analysis of a coherence relation (viz. addition) and its connectives across a sign language (French Belgian Sign Language) and a spoken language (French), both used in the same geographical area. The analysis examines the frequency and types of connectives that can express an additive relation, in order to contrast its “markedness” in the two languages, that is, whether addition is marked by dedicated connectives or by ambiguous, polyfunctional ones. Furthermore, we investigate the functions of the most frequent additive connective in each language (namely et and the sign SAME), starting from the observation that most connectives are highly polyfunctional. This analysis intends to show which functions are compatible with the meaning of addition in spoken and signed discourse. Despite a common core of shared discourse functions, the equivalence between et and SAME is only partial and relates to a difference in their semantics.