Lexical creation by signing apes

[Celso Álvarez Cáccamo]

Ron,

At 12:06 2001-05-14 -0400, Ronald Kephart wrote:

>Barbara LeMaster wrote:
>
>>Homophony in signing would be iconization - recreating something that's
>>visual.
>
>Help, please; sign language is not my field. I'm not sure I understand the
>use of "iconization" here. I understand that the "new" sign looks like the
>old sign, but the relationship between the new sign and its referent (the
>lettuce) is not iconic, right? It looks to me like a case of
>*de*-iconization, if we take the original sign (for eyebrows) to be iconic
>(altho I also wonder if it wasn't more like an index than an icon).
>
>Ronald Kephart
>Program in Foreign Languages
>University of North Florida

I know very little about sign languages, too, but yes, you may be right.
I've just watched the scene again. Koko brings her two hands clasped in a
fist to both her eyebrows once. That's not iconic, but indexical
(pointing), right? What do experts say? Apparently the ALS sign for
'eyebrow' is bringing one's fist to one's eyebrow. So, was Koko signing the
*plural* of the English word, which phonetically resembles 'browse'?

At any rate, whether de-iconization or de-indexicalization, the procedure
(if confirmed) is very interesting, at least to me, as it goes beyond
iconicity or indexicality to arbitrariness.


Celso Alvarez Cáccamo              Tel. +34 981 167000 ext. 1888
Linguística Geral, Faculdade de Filologia     FAX +34 981 167151
Universidade da Corunha                          lxalvarz at udc.es
15071 A Corunha, Galiza (Espanha)  http://www.udc.es/dep/lx/cac/