The Role of Iconicity in Home Sign Language

Abstract

The study of signed languages provides an interesting insight into the way humans develop communication systems. The present study involves an analysis of a selected set of chosen vocabulary used by an adult homesigner, and then is compared to the productions made by his hearing wife. By comparing the signs made by both of them, conclusions are to be made about the role iconicity plays in their languages. The wife -a hearing woman- was asked to describe a set of pictures, and the man was asked to describe what he sees respectively. Grammarians since Saussure have investigated whether language signs and symbols are arbitrary or not. In general, they have insisted that the relation between languages and symbols produced by the speakers is arbitrary (Frishberg, 1975). In particular, this paper may shed light on questions of language creation, especially the question “How many brains does it take to make a language