Metathesis in signs/motor economy

[Mark A. Mandel]

Joerg's extensive post reminds me of work I did as a graduate student at
Berkeley in the late 70s and a postdoc at Northeastern 1981-83. Not only
gravity but mass, momentum (via kinesics), and anatomy (via kinesiology)
affect sign structure.

I gave a paper one year in Boston while still a Berkeley student, called
"The Knuckle-Wrist Connection", demonstrating the influence on ASL
phonology of what kinesiologists call the "tendon effect". The flexor and
extensor muscles of the fingers are anchored in the forearm. Flexing the
wrist (bringing the palm "forward" toward the forearm) lengthens the
distance the extensors have to reach, along the back of the forearm and the
hand, pulling the fingers into extension. (If you try to flex your wrist
fully while keeping your fist clenched, you'll feel it.) Conversely,
hyperextending the wrist (bending the hand "back", as when pushing on a
door) lengthens the flexors's path along the palmar surface and the fingers
will tend to flex. The statistical correlation in the entries of Stokoe,
Casterline, & Croneberg's _Dictionary of American Sign Language_ between
palmward hand movement and finger extension, and dorsad hand movement and
finger flexion, is overwhelming. I think the paper was published somewhere
but I can't recall where.

I think there is also some kinesic correlation in the patterns of
two-handed repeated movement, with a tendency to prefer alternating or
simultaneous (in-phase) movement in different planes, favoring torso
stability; but this, if I recall correctly, was not nearly so strong as the
tendon effect.

                  Mark A. Mandel : Senior Linguist
 Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company : speech recognition
 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com