Title: The phonology and morphology of initialized signs in American Sign Language
Language: English
The ASL sign FAMILY is initialized, because it is signed with an F-handshape matching the initial
f in the English word family. Initialized signs constitute a notable proportion of ASL's core
lexicon (Padden 1998), and were originally a part of ASL's parent language, Old French Sign
Language (Stokoe 1960). Today, initialization remains a productive strategy for borrowing
English words into ASL. However, despite the prevalence of initialized signs in ASL, few
studies investigate their phonological and morphological characteristics in depth.
This paper uses The American Sign Language Handshape Dictionary (Tennant and Brown
2010), which lists over 300 initialized signs, as a corpus for two related studies. The first study
quantitatively examines the phonological properties of initialized signs. The results show, for
example, how certain handshapes (e.g., D, E, N, R, W, M, T) are used almost exclusively for
initialization, and are not typically phonemic in the ASL lexicon (Figure 1). Phonologically,
initialization combines characteristics that are found both in lexical borrowings and in loan
translations (Winford 2010). Like loan translations, initialized signs are foreign words replicated
using the native word-formation system. Like lexical borrowing, initialization introduces new
phonemic contrasts in the borrowing language. The results of this study also show that, aside
from their handshapes, which mark them as foreign vocabulary, initialized signs obey
independently motivated phonological constraints in ASL (Brentari and Padden 2001).
The second study investigates the morphology of initialization. Though it is tempting to classify
the handshape in an initialized sign as a meaningful word-formation unit, i.e., a morpheme, the
formal details of such an analysis are not so straightforward. Traditionally, a morpheme is a
recurrent, meaningful part of a word, and morphologically complex words should decompose
exhaustively into morphemes (cf. Fernald and Napoli 2000). Thus, labeling the F-handshape in
FAMILY a morpheme meaning "family" is problematic: what meanings do the remaining
phonological parameters have? How do we ensure that the F-handshape means "family" only in
the intended sign? Here, I argue that initialized signs are blends (like smog and brunch in
English), which create new words by recombining phonological substrings of already existing
words (Algeo 1977, Bauer 1983). This avoids the problems associated with a morpheme-based
analysis, and has the added benefit of allowing us to use the same terminology to describe
families of initialized signs, which share some aspect of form and meaning (ASL GROUP, CLASS,
TEAM, and FAMILY), and families of blends, which similarly overlap in form and meaning
(English alcoholic, chocaholic, shopaholic, and workaholic). This is a novel analysis both for
initialized signs and for spoken language blends.
Initialized signs have previously been used to investigate sociolinguistic factors (Machabee
1995), language contact and comparison (Schmaling 2001), and language acquisition and
education (Padden and Ramsay 1998). This paper argues that systematic analysis of initialized
signs also answers interesting questions about lexicalization processes in sign language, namely,
how foreign elements are assimilated into sign languages, and how non-affixational
morphological processes, which are commonly found in sign languages, challenge traditional
assumptions in morphological theory.
Figure 1 Initialization in The American Sign Language Handshape Dictionary
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