Iconic or arbitrary? Motivated or immotivated? Different kinds of motivation in signs in Libras

• Autor(a) principal: Medeiros, Davi Vieira
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Outros Autores: Rodero-Takahira, Aline Garcia
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Revista da ABRALIN (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://revista.abralin.org/index.php/abralin/article/view/1748
• topic: Arbitrariedade; Iconicidade; Motivação linguística; Línguas de sinais; Libras; Arbitrariness; Iconicity; Linguistic motivation; Sign Languages; Libras

There are authors such as Klima e Bellugi (1979), Ferreira-Brito (1995), Taub (2001), Wilcox (2004) e Xavier (2006), who consider iconicity as being significantly present in sign languages (SLs). In this paper, we discuss and question the notions of arbitrariness and iconicity in sign languages and more specifically in Libras. To do so, we verified how the existing literature approaches these concepts in relation to sign languages, and we analyzed the signs annotated in Capovilla et al. (2017) with words initialized by letter 'A' concerning their possible motivations. Altogether, we assume and argue that arbitrariness and iconicity are not opposing notions, and they are concepts of different orders; we demonstrate that arbitrariness and immotivation, on the one hand, and iconicity and motivation, on the other hand, are not synonymous (KLIMA; BELLUGI, 1979; FRYDRYCH, 2012); and we point out that signs of Libras are highly motivated and, in most cases, are made up from more than one motivation. We have detected and classified six kinds of motivations, which are: (1) classifiers; (2) gestuality; (3) spatiality; (4) linguistic borrowing from Portuguese; (5) non-manual markers; and (6) movement. From this categorization, we have observed that one lexical item can present more than one kind of motivation, and that not all types of motivations are iconic. We concluded the paper presenting a proposal of gradation that involves since signs that are less iconic to signs that are more iconic.