@ Research
Frequency effects on NOT collocations in ASL
- Multi-word expressions in ASL
- Frequency effects on NOT collocations in ASL
- SELF pronouns in ASL
- Undershoot (aka. sign lowering) in ASL
Frequency effects on NOT collocations in ASL
The first known study on frequency effects on two-sign combinations (and larger units) is my own work on NOT collocations. I examined frequency effects on two-sign combinations (aka. collocations) with a grammatical manual negation morpheme glossed as NOT in ASL. Previous literature found that frequency of usage influences the emergence of grammatical constructions in spoken languages. However, this line of questioning is novel for signed languages. This study revealed that NOT is produced most often with a small set of specific signs, and found evidence that the grammaticalization of NOT increases as its frequency does in ASL collocations. This analysis finds that a few signs are highly phonologically fused with the negation morpheme, providing emerging evidence that these collocations have experienced change known as chunking, emerging as schematic, fused constituent structures in ASL. Given frequency effects found in this study, this chunking appears to be a domain-general cognitive processing mechanism that is independent of modality. The study on NOT collocations showed that frequency and entrenchment are two of the driving factors that contribute to language change in ASL, indicating cognitive domain mechanisms at work.
Citations:
Wilkinson, E. (2016). Finding frequency effects in usage of NOT collocations in American Sign Language. Sign Language & Linguistics, 19(1), 82-123. https://doi.org/10.1075/sll.19.1.03wil.
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Erin Wilkinson
Professor
Department of Linguistics
University of New Mexico
Contact: /www.unm.edu/~ewilkins/.
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