Taboo terms offer a playground for linguistic creativity in language after language, and sign languages form no exception. The present paper offers the first investigation of taboo terms in sign languages from a cognitive linguistic perspective. We analyze the linguistic mechanisms that introduce offense, focusing on the combined effects of cognitive metonymy and iconicity. Using the Think Aloud Protocol, we elicited offensive or crass signs and dysphemisms from nine signers. We find that German Sign Language uses a variety of linguistic (...) means to introduce and enhance offense, many of which rely on iconic properties of the taboo sign. In conjunction with cross-linguistically common metonymic word-formation strategies, the degree of visual explicitness of a sign increases its potential to offend. Semantically similar taboo signs based on the same metonymic anchor but differing in their degree of iconicity also differ in offensiveness. This allows for creating dysphemisms and euphemisms via phonological changes to a sign. We further show that embodiment creates modality-enhanced ‘vicarious embarrassment’ in the viewer that results in the respective signs being judged obscene or offensive. Further, lexical blending and non-manual enhancement play a role in the creation of dysphemisms in DGS. Lastly, we propose that iconicity as a cognitive structuring principle of linguistic expressions constrains the possible semantic extensions of iconic taboo terms. (shrink)

Around 96 percent of children with hearing loss are born to parents with intact hearing, who may initially know little about deafness or sign language. Therefore, such parents will need information and support in making decisions about the medical, linguistic, and educational management of their child. Some of these decisions are time-sensitive and irreversible and come at a moment of emotional turmoil and vulnerability (when some parents grieve the loss of a normally hearing child). Clinical research indicates that a deaf (...) child’s poor communication skills can be made worse by increased level of parental depression. Given this, the importance of reliable and up-to-date support for parents’ decisions is critical to the overall well-being of their child. In raising and educating a child, parents are often offered an exclusive choice between an oral environment (including assistive technology, speech reading, and voicing) and a signing environment. A heated controversy surrounds this choice, and has since at least the late 19th century, beginning with the International Congress on the Education of the Deaf in Milan, held in 1880. While families seek advice from many sources, including, increasingly, the internet, the primary care physician (PCP) is the professional medical figure the family interacts with repeatedly.The present article aims to help family advisors, particularly the PCP and other medical advisors in this regard. We argue that deaf children need to be exposed regularly and frequently to good language models in both visual and auditory modalities from the time hearing loss is detected and continued throughout their education to ensure proper cognitive, psychological, and educational development. Since there is, unfortunately, a dearth of empirical studies on many of the issues families must confront, professional opinions, backed by what studies do exist, are the only option. We here give our strongly held professional opinions and stress the need for improved research studies in these areas. (shrink)

We argue for the existence of a state constitutional legal right to language. Our purpose here is to develop a legal framework for protecting the civil rights of the deaf child, with the ultimate goal of calling for legislation that requires all levels of government to fund programs for deaf children and their families to learn a fully accessible language: a sign language. While our discussion regards the United States, the argument we make is based on human rights and the (...) nature of law itself, and can likely be adapted to any country.We begin with an introduction to the biological facts surrounding language acquisition and how these facts impact the deaf child, where lack of language has devastating effects on individuals and negative effects on society in general. (shrink)

Echo phonology was originally proposed to account for obligatory coordination of manual and mouth articulations observed in several sign languages. However, previous research into the phenomenon lacks clear criteria for which components of movement can or must be copied when the articulators are so different. Nor is there discussion of which nonmanual articulators can echo manual movement. Given the prosodic properties of echoes (coordination of onset/offset and of dynamics such as speed) as well as general motoric coordination of various articulators (...) in the human body, we expect that the mouth is not the only nonmanual articulator involved in echo phonology. In this study, we look at a fixed set of lexical items across 36 sign languages and establish that the head can echo manual movement with respect to timing and to the axis/axes of manual movement. We propose that what matters in echo phonology is the visual percept of temporally coordinated movement that repeats a salient movement property in such a way as to give the visual impression of a copy. Our findings suggest that echoes are not obligatory motor couplings of two or more articulators but may enhance phonological distinctions that are otherwise difficult to see. (shrink)

Sign language phonological parameters are somewhat analogous to phonemes in spoken language. Unlike phonemes, however, there is little linguistic literature arguing that these parameters interact at the sublexical level. This situation raises the question of whether such interaction in spoken language phonology is an artifact of the modality or whether sign language phonology has not been approached in a way that allows one to recognize sublexical parameter interaction. We present three studies in favor of the latter alternative: a shape‐drawing study (...) with deaf signers from six countries, an online dictionary study of American Sign Language, and a study of selected lexical items across 34 sign languages. These studies show that, once iconicity is considered, handshape and movement parameters interact at the sublexical level. Thus, consideration of iconicity makes transparent similarities in grammar across both modalities, allowing us to maintain certain key findings of phonological theory as evidence of cognitive architecture. (shrink)