JOURNAL LINGUISTICS

Tommi Jantunen

The Complexity of Lexical Movements in Fin SL

The paper discusses and shows the analysis of the movements in Finnish Sign Language (Fin SL). The main study in this paper is to shows the distribution of movements that followed the linguistic principle that known as Zipf’s Law derived from spoken language: the least complex movements occurred most frequently, and an increase in complexity was associated with a decrease in frequency. Beside that the behavior of movements itself as well as theoretical implications, are discussed.

And This article investigates the complexity of movement in Finnish Sign Language (Fin SL) lexemes. So far, the complexity of movement in Fin SL lexemes has not been studied and previous research has focused mainly on the study of movement phonemes, morphological and phonetic processes.

Movements can divide into two forms manual movements and non manual movements. Manual movements are movements made by the hands and it can be dividing also into two classes: path movements and local movements. Path movements are articulated by the elbow or shoulder join and they result in a discrete change of place of articulation in the sign space on the body or in the external space in front of the signer. Local movements are articulated by the wrist or the finger joints and they result in a change of hand shape or orientation of the hands or a trilled.

            Non manual movements are movements made by articulators other than the hands. Traditionally, non manuality has been more or less neglected in phonological analysis, and this may be one of the factors that have caused the current situation in Fin SL research where there is no consensus as to what exactly the non manual articulators are and what the exact nature of non manual movements is hence.

In general, complexity is understood to be a property of a movement which correlates with the number of joints used in the movement's production. Complexity of movement is thus here considered to correlate with the number of joints and articulators, or parallel subcomponents, used in the production of movement.

In this article, that is examined the complexity of lexical movements in Fin SL, defining complexity as a property of a movement which correlates with the number of subcomponents (joints and articulators) used in its production. As a main result, four main types of movement varying in their degree of complexity have emerged: simple, complex, super complex and hyper complex movements. Beside that there is also two hypotheses about the synchronic and diachronic behavior of movements in Fin SL: non manual movements will be dropped and movements in general will be reduced in complexity. The proper testing of these hypotheses is left to future study.