Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

1 results

  • 15 - The architecture of intersubjectivity revisited

  • from Part III - Interaction and intersubjectivity
  • Edited by N. J. Enfield, Paul Kockelman, Yale University, Connecticut, Jack Sidnell, University of Toronto
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology
    Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    11 September 2014, pp 364-399

  • Summary

    Humans naturally acquire the language or languages that they are exposed to in early childhood, but these languages are different from one another and are all the product of historical change over many millennia, much of it resulting from chance. Natural sign languages are social creations that emerge in communities with an acute need to communicate. Many sign languages in Europe and North America developed from the establishment of schools for deaf children through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The study of new sign languages such as Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) offers a real-life view of how a language emerges a new, how it conventionalizes and spreads across users in a community. A fundamental property of human language is the existence of syntax, the level of organization that contains conventions for combining symbolic units, the words. The chapter also discusses lexicons, phonology, morphology, and semantics that characterize language.