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Article published In: Sign Language & Linguistics
Vol. 19:1 (2016) ► pp.37–81

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Taking meaning in hand

Iconic motivations in two-handed signs

 | Department of Linguistics, University of California, San Diego, USA
 | Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
 | Sign Language Research Laboratory, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel
Published online: 15 September 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/sll.19.1.02lep
Traditionally in sign language research, the issue of whether a lexical sign is articulated with one hand or two has been treated as a strictly phonological matter. We argue that accounting for two-handed signs also requires considering meaning as a motivating factor. We report results from a Swadesh list comparison, an analysis of semantic patterns among two-handed signs, and a picture-naming task. Comparing four unrelated languages, we demonstrate that the two hands are recruited to encode various relationship types in sign language lexicons. We develop the general principle that inherently “plural” concepts are straightforwardly mapped onto our paired human hands, resulting in systematic use of the two hands across sign languages. In our analysis, “plurality” subsumes four primary relationship types — interaction, location, dimension, and composition — and we predict that signs with meanings that encompass these relationships — such as ‘meet’, ‘empty’, ‘large’, or ‘machine’ — will preferentially be two-handed in any sign language.
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2018. Metaphor in Sign Languages. Frontiers in Psychology 9 DOI logo
Nyst, Victoria
2018. Cross-linguistic variation in space-based distance for size depiction in the lexicons of six sign languages. Sign Language & Linguistics 21:2 ► pp. 350 ff. DOI logo
Perlman, Marcus, Hannah Little, Bill Thompson & Robin L. Thompson
2018. Iconicity in Signed and Spoken Vocabulary: A Comparison Between American Sign Language, British Sign Language, English, and Spanish. Frontiers in Psychology 9 DOI logo
Östling, Robert, Carl Börstell & Servane Courtaux
2018. Visual Iconicity Across Sign Languages: Large-Scale Automated Video Analysis of Iconic Articulators and Locations. Frontiers in Psychology 9 DOI logo
HWANG, SO-ONE, NOZOMI TOMITA, HOPE MORGAN, RABIA ERGIN, DENIZ İLKBAŞARAN, ARON SEEGERS MARIE, RYAN LEPIC & CAROL PADDEN
2017. Of the body and the hands: patterned iconicity for semantic categories. Language and Cognition 9:4 ► pp. 573 ff. DOI logo
Sandler, Wendy
2017. The Challenge of Sign Language Phonology. Annual Review of Linguistics 3:1 ► pp. 43 ff. DOI logo
Sandler, Wendy
2018. The Body as Evidence for the Nature of Language. Frontiers in Psychology 9 DOI logo
Sandler, Wendy
2021. Signs and words. In All Things Morphology [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 353], ► pp. 57 ff. DOI logo
Sandler, Wendy
2022. Redefining Multimodality. Frontiers in Communication 6 DOI logo
Sandler, Wendy
2024. Speech and sign: the whole human language. Theoretical Linguistics 50:1-2 ► pp. 107 ff. DOI logo
Sandler, Wendy & Diane Lillo‐Martin
2017. Sign Languages. In The Handbook of Linguistics, ► pp. 371 ff. DOI logo
Börstell, Carl, Ryan Lepic & Gal Belsitzman
2016. Articulatory plurality is a property of lexical plurals in sign language. Lingvisticae Investigationes 39:2 ► pp. 391 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 4 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

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