Showing language change: examining depiction in Israeli Sign Language

Signers can show meaning through whole-body enactment, in which all of the bodily articulators enact the actions of a referent, or through the use of depicting signs, in which the hands depict the movement and location of the referent. One subtype of depicting signs is known as a whole-entity handshape. Two frequent whole-entity handshapes are the 1-handshape, with an extended index finger pointing upwards, and the 2-handshape, with an index and middle fingers pointing downwards. Studies suggest that the choice of depiction may exhibit systematic variation depending on the generation of the signer (McKee, Rachel, Josefina Safar & Sara Pivac Alexander. 2021. Form, frequency and sociolinguistic variation in depicting signs in New Zealand sign language. Language & Communication 79(July). 95–117) and the different stages of a sign language lifecycle (Kegl, Judy, Ann Senghas & Marie Coppola. 1999. Creation through contact: Sign language emergence and sign language change in Nicaragua. In Michel DeGraff (ed.), Language creation and language change: Creolization, diachrony, and development. MIT press; Aronoff, Mark, Irit Meir, Carol A. Padden & Wendy Sandler. 2003. Classifier constructions and morphology in two Sign Languages. (2003): 53–84. In Karen Emmorey (ed.), Perspectives on classifier constructions in Sign Languages. Psychology Press). The aim of this study is to look at the predictors of two distributions: whole-body enactment versus depicting handshapes, and within depicting handshapes, the distributions of 1-handshape versus 2-handshape variants. Our dataset includes signers of a relatively young sign language, Israeli Sign Language (ISL), which is about 90 years old. Using the Corpus of ISL (Stamp, Rose, Ora Ohanin & Sara Lanesman. 2022. The corpus of Israeli Sign Language. In Paper presented at conference proceedings (LREC). Language Resources (LRs) and Evaluation for Human Language Technologies (HLT). Marseille, France: European Language Resources Association (ELRA)), the results show five main significant findings. We find (1) less use of whole-body enactment by younger signers than older signers, (2) more use of enactment by female signers, (3) more use of 1-handshape variants by signers who were born hearing, (4) movement direction is a significant predictor of 1-handshape use, and (5) there is a strong association between handshape choice and lexical meaning.