The ‘paradox’ of sign language morphology” by Adam Schembri

• Autor(a) principal: Silva-Júnior, Daltro Roque Carvalho da
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Outros Autores: Xavier, André Nogueira
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Revista da ABRALIN (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://revista.abralin.org/index.php/abralin/article/view/1667
• topic: Complexidade morfológica; Tipologia sociolinguística; Línguas de sinais; Morphological complexity; Sociolinguistic typology; Signed languages

Adam Schembri discussed the concept of morphological complexity in sign languages, as well as the paradoxes that result from the analysis of these languages ​​in the light of the views of Aronoff, Meier and Sandler (2005) and Trudgill (2011). According to the speaker, the first authors do not define such a concept, but it can be inferred from their work that they associate it with the plurimorphic composition of the sign. In this perspective, the paradox of the morphology of sign languages ​​emerges from the fact that these languages ​​have a mixture of characteristics typical of polysynthetic ​​and creole languages. Alternatively, Trudgill defines the morphological complexity based on the acquisition difficulties faced by adult foreign language learners: the irregularity, the unpredictability of allomorphs, the redundancy and the morphological marking of categories. In this perspective, the paradox of sign language morphology stems from the scarcity of these properties in these languages, even though they present morphologically complex constructions involving indicating verbs and classifiers.