Usage-based grammars and sign languages: Evidence from Auslan, BSL and NZSL

Adam Schembri, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia

Trevor Johnston, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

1. Introduction

Hollmann and Siewierska (2011) noted that scholars in cognitive linguistics have argued for

some time (e.g. Langacker, 1999) that language should be analysed as both a cognitive and a

social phenomenon, and not solely as resulting from processes within the mind of the

individual speaker. Despite this there has been very little work that has explored the

relationships between cognitive linguistics and sociolinguistics. With the publication of two

edited volumes by Kristiansen and Dirven (2008) and by Geeraerts, Kristiansen and Peirsman

(2010), the field of ‘cognitive sociolinguistics’ has, however, begun to emerge from these

inter-connecting perspectives on language. In particular, much of the work draws on insights

from variationist sociolinguistics (see Hollman & Siewerksa, 2011, for a summary). This

partly reflects the somewhat under-appreciated fact that work within variationist linguistics

often has implications for an understanding of language in general, as the multivariate

approach to the study of corpus data can be used to test claims made within any linguistic

theory (Walker, 2010). For example, recent variationist analyses of the complementiser that

in Canadian English (Torres Cacoullos & Walker, 2009) and of definite article reduction in

the Lancashire dialect of British English (Hollmann & Siewierksa, 2011) provides support for

usage-based accounts of grammar. In this paper, we discuss a number of findings on variation

in specific phonological, morphological and syntactic features in Auslan (Australian Sign

Language), New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) and British Sign Language (BSL) that

provide some support for usage-based theories of language (Schembri et al., 2009; de

Beuzeville, Johnston & Schembri, 2009; McKee et al., 2011; Fenlon et al., 2010). First, we

provide a brief background to usage-based grammar and corpus-based methodologies in sign

languages. Second, we discuss the role of lexical frequency effects and phonological

reduction and assimilation in large datasets of naturalistic discourse from these three sign

languages. Third, we explore the role of lexical frequency in the grammaticalisation of

indicating verbs (de Beuzeville, Johnston & Schembri, 2009). Lastly, we discuss evidence for

short-term structural priming in variable subject noun phrase expression (McKee et al., 2011).

We argue here that all of these studies provide support for a usage-based theory of grammar,

the first time these many strands of different evidence has been presented using sign language

data.

2. Usage-based grammar

Usage-based approaches to linguistics encompass a range of different theoretical perspectives

on the nature of language (e.g., Langacker, 2001; Bybee, 2001; Tomasello, 2003), but these

different points of view all share an understanding that grammar is not only a system for

organising the production and comprehension of language, but that it is the result of non-

linguistic processes at work during linguistic interactions.

Bybee (2006) proposed that grammar could be conceptualised as the cognitive

organisation of a speaker’s experience with language. Aspects of this experience, such as the

frequency of particular words and constructions in a language, affects the representation of

grammar in a speaker’s mind and this impacts on processes of language variation and change.

Bybee (2006) proposes that this is because a speaker’s mental representation of a language is

similar to the representation of other phenomena in the world – the same general aspects of

cognition which make it possible for us to categorise things in the world as identical, similar

or different, also work on the linguistic phenomena that we experience every day. The

cognitive representation of language that results from this experience is the basis of what

linguists call ‘grammar’.

3. The role of lexical frequency

One of the key sources of evidence for a usage-based grammar is the relationship between the

frequency of use of particular words and constructions, cognitive representations of these

structures and the impact this has on the language variation and change. As Bybee (2006)

points out, it is widely recognised by phoneticians and psycholinguists that lexical frequency

has an important role in speech production and processing. Token frequency, for example,

appears to strengthen memory representation for lexical items. Experimental studies have

shown that participants respond to tasks involving high frequency lexical items more quickly

than to tasks involving low frequency words (Bybee, 2007). It has also been often observed

that high frequency words appear to undergo reduction at a greater rate than low frequency

words (Philips, 1984; Bybee, 2002; Dinkin, 2007). This may be because recognition of high

frequency verbs occurs more quickly, resulting in less need to produce phonologically fuller

forms.

As we have seen above, cognitive linguists that propose a usage-based model of

linguistic knowledge also recognise the crucial role played by token frequency (e.g., Bybee &

Scheibman, 1999; Hollmann & Siewierska, 2011). Despite some doubts about the role of

frequency effects in language variation and change (Labov, 2006), more work in variationist

linguistics has begun to explore the role of token frequency (see Tagliamonte, 2011, for an

overview). Prior to the work by Schembri, Johnston and Goswell (2006) on Auslan, however,

no studies had been undertaken which investigated the possible relationship between variation

and token frequency in sign languages.

4. The role of structural priming

Priming is an experimental method widely used in psycholinguistics research to investigate

mental representations of spoken and signed language (e.g., Bock, 1986; Emmorey, 1991;

Dye & Shih, 2006). In priming experiments, psychologists have shown that the preceding

stimulus (such as a preceding word or sign) increases the likelihood at which a speaker will

produce an identical or related response. Recent work has claimed that priming also occurs

for abstract linguistic structures that are independent of specific words, such as particular

syntactic constructions (Bock & Griffin, 2000). This suggests that speakers have cognitive

representations of specific abstract structures, and that use of these constructions triggers

particular responses, including an increasing tendency to use the same construction again.

Indeed, evidence from naturalistic discourse data shows that there is an “unintentional and

pragmatically unmotivated tendency to repeat the general syntactic pattern of an utterance”

(Bock & Griffin, 2000:177). For example, research has shown that the use of a passive

construction in one clause tends to lead to the production of the passive in the clauses that

follow (Bock, 1986). This provides evidence for a usage-based model of grammar, because it

is supports the notion of “...grammar emerging through discourse...rather than as an abstract

entity fully contained in the mind of speakers and accessed independently for each utterance”

(Travis, 2007: 102).

5. Corpus-based approaches to the study of sign language

Bybee (2006) has pointed out that, although there may be varying viewpoints on usage-based

approaches to grammar amongst cognitive/functional linguists and sociolinguists, they are

united by a common methodology: an interest in using large corpora of naturally-occurring

language use collected from a representative sample of a speech community as the basis for

their descriptive and theoretical work. Researchers in cognitive/functionalist approaches with

an interest in the interaction between usage and grammar have long used large datasets of

natural discourse (e.g., Givon, 1979; Hopper & Thompson, 1980), as is also true of

variationist sociolinguists (e.g., Labov, 1972; Lucas, Bayley & Valli, 2001).

The increasingly availability of large machine-readable corpora of spoken language

has meant that the analysis of spontaneous language use is more straightforward than in the

past. Technological developments, such as greater access to digital video data and the

software that makes annotation of video possible has also opened up the possibility of corpus-

based approaches to sign languages. The findings that we discuss in this paper draw on the

analyses of some pioneering work in the corpus linguistics of sign languages, so we will

outline these developments here.

5.1 Auslan Corpora

The Auslan Corpus is a collection of digital video data collected from 255 deaf individuals in

the five state capital cities of Australia (Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney) as

part of two separate major research projects. In 2003, the three-year Sociolinguistic Variation

in Auslan Project (SVIAP) began. This project was a replication of a similar project on

American Sign Language undertaken by Ceil Lucas and her colleagues (Lucas, Bayley &

Valli, 2001). As part of this study, 211 deaf individuals in the five state capitals were filmed

in groups of two to five people during 2003 and 2004. The sample was mixed for gender, age,

socioeconomic status and language background (with around a third having signing deaf

parents and thus having acquired Auslan from birth, and two thirds having hearing parents

who mostly did not sign). Recruitment prioritised participants who reported learning Auslan

in early childhood (by seven years of age) and used Auslan as their primary or preferred

language. Data was of three main types: (1) a free conversation of 30-40 minutes in which

participants were filmed talking on a range of topics of their own choosing; (2) a

sociolinguistic interview, in which participants answered a range of questions about the sign

language use in daily life; and (3) a lexical elicitation task in which participants produced

their sign for 80 concepts. No researchers, deaf or hearing, were presenting during (1). Both

(2) and (3) were led by a deaf native signer research assistant, and a hearing researcher was

sometimes present. In 2004, funding from the Endangered Languages Documentation Project

(ELDP) made further data collection possible, in order specifically to create a corpus of

Auslan. During 2004-2005, 100 participants were filmed in the five state capitals (20 at each

site), including 44 participants not previously filmed in the SVIAP project. The recruitment

process was similar to that used to create the earlier SVIAP sample, being balanced for gender

and region, and mixed for language background and socioeconomic status. The data collected

were, however, mostly of text types that were not collected in the SVIAP dataset: the three

hours of language activities filmed included a survey of attitudes towards deafness and sign

language, narratives elicited by pictorial and written stimuli, barrier games, and descriptions

of various video stimuli. In this dataset, participants were filmed working with a deaf native

signer research assistant, or in paired activities with another deaf participant, and no hearing

people were present.

5.2 New Zealand Sign Language corpora

Perhaps the first attempt to undertake a large-scale machine-readable corpus of any sign

language was the Wellington Corpus of New Zealand Sign Language (WCNZSL) project

(McKee & Kennedy, 1999; 2006). This was a project that focussed on the transcription, using

glossing, of 50 hours of videotaped NZSL data. The WCNZSL corpus included 80 deaf

people engaged in conversations, telling stories, making speeches, discussing a range of

topics and involved in activities, such as committee meetings. The participants were aged

from 18 to 55 years old, included 45 women and 35 men, and were mixed for ethnicity (12

were from Maori backgrounds). Each sign token was glossed by an English word or phrase

and entered to create a searchable dataset, yielding a collection of 7,222 sign types in the set

of 100,000 tokens (note, however, that –based on the minimal description of the

methodology– it is not clear how consistently tokenised the data from the WCNZSL were).

The Sociolinguistic Variation in New Zealand Project followed the Auslan and ASL

sociolinguistics projects. In the NZSL project, 138 deaf individuals in the five cities and

towns were filmed during 2005 and 2006. The sample was balanced for gender, age, ethnicity

(13% Maori and 87% European origin), and language background (with approximately 7%

having signing deaf parents and thus having acquired NZSL from birth, and 93% having

hearing parents who mostly did not sign). The recruitment of participants targetted those who

reported learning NZSL in early childhood (by seven years of age) and used NZSL as their

primary or preferred language. As in the Auslan project, data was of three main types: (1) a

free conversation of 30-40 minutes in which participants were filmed talking on a range of

topics of their own choosing; (2) a sociolinguistic interview, in which participants answered a

range of questions about the sign language use in daily life; and (3) a lexical elicitation task in

which participants produced their sign for 80 concepts. No researchers, deaf or hearing, were

presenting during (1). Both (2) and (3) were led by a deaf signer research assistants.

5.3 The British Sign Language Corpus Project

During 2008-2011, work began on the creation of a corpus of BSL. Drawing on experiences

from the SVIAP and Auslan Corpus work in Australia, data was collected from 249 deaf

participants at eight sites across all four countries within the United Kingdom (Belfast,

Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, London, Manchester, and Newcastle). The sample

was balanced for gender, and included individuals from a range of age groups, mixed for

language background (approximately a third having deaf parents, and two-thirds from hearing

families), socioeconomic class, and ethnicity (with approximately 10% of participants being

of Afro-Caribbean or south Asian background). Recruitment was focussed, for the most part,

on participants who reported learning BSL by seven years of age. The data collected was

similar to the previous sociolinguistic variation projects in Australian and New Zealand deaf

communities: data was of four main types: (1) a short personal experience narrative, (2) a free

conversation of 30 minutes in which participants were filmed talking on a range of topics of

their own choosing; (2) a sociolinguistic interview, in which participants answered a range of

questions about variation and change in BSL; and (3) a lexical elicitation task in which

participants produced their sign for 102 concepts. Unlike the Auslan and NZSL projects, all

participants were filmed in pairs rather than groups, usually with someone from the same

region and same age group. No hearing people were present during the filming.

6. Lexical frequency in sign languages

Before we move on to discuss evidence for a role for lexical frequency effects in phonological

and morphological variation and change in sign languages, we need to provide some

background about research into the question of token frequency itself. Lexical frequency in

sign languages has only been the focus of four specific studies to date, two of which have

direct relevance to the findings reported here. First, McKee and Kennedy (1999, 2006) report

an investigation into NZSL, based on a dataset of 100,000 glossed sign tokens in the

Wellington Corpus of NZSL (described above). A much smaller study was conducted by

Morford and MacFarlane (2003) on American Sign Language, drawing on a collection of

4,111 sign tokens. However, not only was this a very small dataset, it only consisted of

transcriptions of a number of commercially available videotapes of ASL produced by 27 deaf

individuals, and it is not clear to what extent these were naturalistic texts. Recently, Johnston

(2012) published the first lexical frequency study to draw on the Auslan Archive and Corpus

which was the first frequency study based on lemmatised glosses (“ID glosses”, see ).

Cormier, Fenlon, Schembri and Rentelis (2011) presented the findings from the first

frequency analysis of the BSL Corpus data, using a dataset of 24,864 tokens. The NZSL and

ASL studies drew on similar text-types for their analysis, representing a mixture of

conversation and narrative data. In contrast, the Auslan study focussed on narrative recounts

and descriptions of a cartoon stimulus, while the BSL study was based on data entirely

collected from spontaneous conversations between 50 individuals. Note, however, that only

the Auslan study drew on an established lexical database of ID glosses to tokenise the data as

systematically as possible. While the BSL study also attempted to do this, a lexical database

of ID glosses needed to be created simultaneously with the lemmatisation work, and the

database is still a work in progress at the time of writing so further work on lexical frequency

may entail some minor revisions of work reported here.

Despite the important differences in methodology (see Johnston, 2012, for a

discussion about the limitations of the ASL and NZSL work), these studies on Auslan, NZSL,

ASL and BSL report similar findings overall. For example, although each of these studies

categorise signs differently, pointing signs are amongst the most frequent signs in all four sign

languages. In particular, pointing signs functioning as first, second and third person singular

pronouns were most frequent in all four studies. The first person singular form (i.e., a point to

the chest, prototypically using an extended index finger) was the most frequent sign in the

Auslan, NZSL and BSL data, and the second most frequent form in the ASL study. In the

ASL study, the second and third person form were grouped together as the non-first person

form, and this was the most frequent sign. All four investigations report relatively few

function signs in the most frequent lexical items compared to studies of English (e.g., Leech

et al., 2001), with a comparatively greater role for content items. The NZSL, BSL and Auslan

studies also suggest that a small number of signs account for a considerable proportion of the

datasets under investigation. For example, in the BSL data, the ten most frequent signs

account for almost 28% of the 24,864 tokens, while the top 100 signs represent around 57%

of the total dataset. For Auslan, the equivalent proportions are approximately 21% for the top

ten, and almost 53% for the top 100. Table 1 shows the top 10 most frequent signs in all four

sign language studies. The glossing has been simplified and standardised the glossing for

comparison purposes. Note that the sign glossed in the BSL list as ‘PT’ represents a pointing

sign that could not be easily categorised as a pronoun (PRO), determiner (DET) or locative

(LOC).

Rank ASL NZSL Auslan BSL

1 PRO2/PRO3 PRO1 PRO1 PRO1

2 PRO1 PRO3 WELL WELL

3 POSS1 GOOD PRO2/PRO3 PRO3

4 NAME DEAF DEAF PT

5 SIGN PRO2 LOOK GOOD

6 IN POSS1 BOY PRO2

7 THEN LOC LOC DET

8 POSS2/POSS3 ONE CL:ANIMATE-

MOVE

LOC

9 SCHOOL SAME HAVE SAME

10 THAT SCHOOL SAME RIGHT

Although larger, more representative corpora and greater use of more consistent

lemmatisation procedures are both needed before more robust measures of lexical frequency

in sign languages can be made available, these results do at least lay the groundwork for an

understanding of the relationship between token frequency and usage-based models of sign

language grammar.

7. Evidence from sign language phonology: Lexical frequency and phonological variation

in Auslan, NZSL and BSL

Drawing on the conversational and interview datasets from the Australian and New Zealand sign

language sociolinguistic variation projects, Schembri et al. (2009) investigated phonological variation

and change in Auslan and NZSL. As in an earlier ASL project (Lucas et al., 2002), these Auslan

and NZSL studies focussed on signs such as THINK, NAME and CLEVER (these are identical in

both sign language varieties) as shown in Figure 1. In their citation form, these signs are

produced on or near the signer’s forehead, but often may be produced at locations lower than

this, either on other parts of the signer’s body (such as near the cheek) or in the space in front

of the signer’s chest, as shown in Figure 2. Multivariate statistical analysis of 2,667 Auslan

and 2096 NZSL tokens in the dataset, collected from 205 and 138 participants in the

Australian and New Zealand corpora respectively, showed a number of linguistic and social

factors were relevant for understanding the nature of location variation in these two related

sign languages. Phonological environment was important, with signs preceding and following

the target signs made on or near the body having a significant influence on whether or not the

target sign appeared as a lowered variant. The results also indicated that women, younger

signers (for Auslan), and native signers (in NZSL) all favoured lowered variants when

compared to older signers, women, and non-native signers. Regional also emerged, with those

in the larger urban centres in both countries tending to use more citation forms than signers

from smaller towns and cities.

THINK NAME CLEVER

Figure 1: THINK, NAME and CLEVER

NAME

Figure 2: Lowered variant of NAME

Of most interest to us here, was the lexical frequency and grammatical function was

the most significant factor in both sign languages. A preliminary analysis of the Auslan data

showed that both grammatical function and sign frequency were significant factors

conditioning the lowering of this class of signs. Verbs appeared to more likely to appear in

lowered form, while adjectives and nouns appeared less likely to do so. In addition, the ten

most frequent lexical items in the dataset tended be more often lowered than low frequency

items. Closer inspection of the data showed, however, that only a subset of verbs (the high

frequency verbs, i.e., THINK, KNOW, NOT-KNOW, REMEMBER, FORGET, UNDERSTAND/REALISE,

WONDER, WORRY) were driving the bulk of the variation, while all the remaining verbs, nouns

and adjectives tended to appear in citation form. In NZSL, high frequency verbs (i.e., THINK,

KNOW, NOT-KNOW, REMEMBER, UNDERSTAND, WONDER, LEARN) also were significantly more

likely to appear in lowered form which was not true of lower frequency verbs, and even less

the case with nouns and adjectives.

Although lexical frequency in these two studies was based on token frequency in the

coded data, comparisons with the Wellington Corpus of NZSL showed that six out of the

seven high frequency verbs were found in the 100 most frequent signs in the corpus, and two

(i.e., THINK and KNOW) were in the top 30 which was not true of any of the other target lexical

items. Similarly for Auslan, the recently published lexical frequency study shows that THINK

and KNOW both appear in the top 30 most frequent lexical items (most of the remaining verbs

appear in the top 300, but it is likely that they would appear more frequently in a corpus based

on conversational data rather than a narrative dataset).

Using data collected as part of the BSL Corpus Project, Jordan Fenlon and colleagues

(Fenlon et al., 2010) conducted the first major study of phonological variation in BSL.

Replicating an earlier ASL study (Bayley, Lucas & Rose, 2002), they examined

sociolinguistic variation in signs produced with the 1 handshape (i.e., with an extended index

finger hand configuration), such as PRO1, TALK and LONDON. This class of signs exhibit

variation in hand configuration. Fenlon et al. (2010) found that this variation, like that in ASL

(Bayley, Lucas & Rose, 2002), may be relatively small, with some bending of the 1

handshape so that it resembles an X handshape, or with thumb extension so that it looks like

an L hand configuration. In some cases, however, the assimilation may be more marked, with

the thumb and other fingers also extended so that the hand configuration resembles a B or 5

handshape. In some early observations about this variation in ASL, Liddell and Johnson

(1989) suggested that this phenomenon might be primarily due to assimilation effects in

which handshape features of the neighbouring signs influenced the variant forms. The results

presented in Fenlon et al. (2010), however, showed that this was certainly true, but that

additional linguistic and social factors were at work in handshape variation. Analysis of the

2,084 examples in the BSL dataset using multivariate statistics revealed the relative strength

of the influence of each factor when compared to other factors, and phonological environment

turned out to the most important linguistic factor. Instead, as in location variation,

grammatical function was also an influence. Signers are more likely to choose the B variant

for pronouns (particularly PRO1), whereas almost all other lexical and function signs are more

often realised in citation form. Social factors were also important, with signers in Cardiff,

Bristol and Belfast using significantly more variant forms, while those in London, Glasgow,

Birmingham and Manchester tended to prefer the citation form.

PRO1 TALK LONDON

Figure 3: PRO1, TALK and LONDON

Again, however, as indicated in the previous studies on location variation in sign

languages outlined above, Fenlon and colleagues were keen to know if lexical frequency was

a factor in handshape variation in BSL, as this was not a factor that was investigated in the

related ASL study. They coded as ‘high frequency signs’ in the BSL data all tokens of the top

five most frequent items produced with a 1 handshape in the study of lexical frequency in the

BSL Corpus conversational dataset described above (Cormier et al., 2011): PRO1, PRO3, PRO2,

DET (a pointing sign that functioned as a determiner), and LOC (a locative pointing sign).

These 5 lexical items represented 51% of the BSL data coded for this study. All other tokens

(representing the remaining 88 lexical items) were coded together as ‘not high frequency

signs’. It was indeed found that these top 5 most frequent signs were significantly more likely

to display handshape variation when compared to less frequent signs.

8. Evidence from sign language morphology: Lexical frequency and the spatial

modification of indicating verbs in Auslan

In the first corpus-based study of its kind, de Beuzeville, Johnston and Schembri (2009)

focussed on the use of directional and/or spatial modifications of indicating verbs (also known

as ‘agreement’ verbs in much of the sign language linguistics literature, e.g., Sandler & Lillo-

Martin, 2006). Indicating verbs are a subset of verb signs in many sign languages that

undergo modifications in their location, orientation and/or direction of movement to signal

changes in the semantic roles (including the agent and patient) associated with the verb

arguments, and/or the location of the action referred to by the verb (de Beuzeville, Johnston &

Schembri, 2009). These signs are distinct from plain verbs which are produced at fixed

locations on the body and cannot be modified in this way, and also from depicting verbs

which show similar modification but additionally include a morphemic handshape that

represents some aspect of the size and shape of the referent (Liddell, 2003; Johnston &

Schembri, 2007).

The aims of this study included: (1) identifying the proportion of indicating verb signs

compared to other classes of verb, (2) the proportion of modified indicating verbs compared

to unmodified indicating verbs, and (3) the factors that conditioned the use of modification,

including lexical frequency effects. These research questions were motivated by a desire to

supplement existing accounts of indicating verbs in sign languages that are based mostly on

elicited datasets with data from large-scale studies of natural discourse.

Data for the indicating verb study was drawn from 50 narratives produced by 45 deaf

participants, balanced for gender (20 men and 25 women) and mixed for age group (ranging

from 14 to 83 years old), region and language background (30 participants had signing deaf

parents, and 15 had hearing parents but reported learning Auslan before the age of seven).

Twenty spontaneous personal experience narratives were selected from the SVIAP and ELDP

datasets, and the remaining 30 were elicited narratives from the ELDP corpus. The latter

group were retellings of the two Aesop’s fables “The Hare And The Tortoise” and “The Boy

Who Cried Wolf”, prepared on the basis of a written English stimulus. A total of 8,642 sign

tokens were analysed, of which 18% (n = 1,556) were indicating verbs. Indicating verbs were

further subdivided into two sets: (1) directional indicating verbs which can be directed away

from and/or towards locations association with referents to signal who is doing what to

whom, and (2) locatable indicating verbs in which the location in which the sign is produced,

but not the direction of the movement, can be modified to signal a relationship with a referent.

Analysis showed that 64% of directional indicating verbs were clearly modified in this way,

whereas only 15% of locatable verbs appeared in modified form. Factors that favoured the

presence of modified indicating verbs included the co-occurrence of constructed action (also

known as role shift) in the clause. If the signer used constructed action (i.e., changes in their

eye gaze direction, their facial expression and body posture to signal changes in reference-

tracking), then this tended to co-occur with modified forms of indicating verbs. This may

reflect shared processes of enactment and mimesis involved in the use of both aspects of sign

language structure.

The finding most relevant to the present discussion was that lexical frequency

appeared to have some effect in conditioning whether an indicating verb was realised in

modified form or not. In the dataset, the top ten most frequent verb forms were the following:

LOOK, SAY, COME, GO, ARRIVE, STOP, GO-TO, SEE, HERD and GET-ATTENTION. These represent

10 out of 131 directional indicating verb types found in the data, yet they account for 57% of

the data. In Johnston (2012), we can see that eight of these signs (e.g., LOOK, SAY, COME, GO,

ARRIVE, STOP, GO-TO, SEE) feature in the top 100 most frequent signs in the Auslan corpus

dataset. With modification as the dependent variable in a chi square test (Fisher’s Exact Test),

we found that the ten top most frequent directional indicating verbs did indeed significantly

favour modification compared to other indicating verbs (the two-tailed P value is less than

0.0001), as shown in Table 7, 14 with them being modified 64% of the time, whereas less

frequent verbs are modified just 48% of the time.

This significant result for lexical frequency as a factor conditioning modification of

indicating verbs in our dataset reflects a suggestion by Bybee (2007) that increased token

frequency of a lexical item in discourse means that individual variants of a form begin to

attain greater autonomy as they weaken or lose their association with other instances of the

same item. Thus, the contexts for use of different spatially modified forms of an indicating

verb may grow in proportion to its frequency of use. In English, for example, high frequency

irregular forms (e.g., go, gone, went) are more likely to retain their irregular morphophonemic

paradigms than low frequency irregular forms (Bybee, 2007). This may also be true of

indicating verbs, with more high frequency forms showing greater variability in form.

9. Evidence from sign language syntax: Short-term structural priming and variable

subject presence in Auslan and NZSL

McKee et al. (2011) reported a study investigating variable expression of ‘subject’1 noun

phrases in Auslan and NZSL, drawing on a subset of the data from the Australian and New

Zealand sign language sociolinguistic variation projects. For Auslan, 20 spontaneous

narratives produced by 20 deaf signers (4 participants from each of the 5 capital cities,

balanced for age, gender and language background) were selected, and transcribed in full,

resulting in a dataset of 977 clauses. For NZSL, 63 narratives produced by 33 deaf signers (23

individuals from a European and 10 from a Maori background), balanced for gender and age,

were extracted from the conversational and interview data. A total of 2145 clauses were

analysed. In both the Auslan and NZSL studies, each clause was coded for the presence or

absence of a subject noun phrase.

Overall, these two studies suggest that variable subject expression in Auslan and

NSZL is influenced by a similar range of linguistic factors as those observed in a previous

study on variable subject in ASL (Wulf et al., 2002) and for spoken languages such as

Spanish (e.g., Travis, 2007), Mandarin Chinese (Jia & Bayley, 2002) and Bislama

(Meyerhoff, 2000). As in these studies, our results are consistent with the view that this

variable feature of syntax in Auslan and NZSL is best accounted for as an effect of

information structure in discourse, with subjects noun phrases that refer to the same referent

as subjects earlier in the discourse more likely to be deleted than those that involve a switch in

reference. As has been claimed in the literature (e.g., Sandler & Lillo-Martin, 2006), verb

morphology, including sign language–specific structures such as verbs that make use of

directionality, were one of the significant influence on the realisation of an overt subject noun

phrase. As explained above, plain verb types cannot move between locations associated with

referents whereas other verb types can do so, and thus the latter group of verbs have strategies

                                                        1 We use the term ‘subject’ to refer to actor arguments in Auslan and NZSL clauses in order to facilitate comparison with the sociolinguistics literature on variable subject presence in spoken languages, but we 

do not intend to make a claim that either Auslan or NZSL has a category of grammatical subject in the 

strictest sense (McKee et al., 2011). 

for reference-tracking that plain verbs do not. The verb type in the clause was a significant

factor in both the Auslan and NZSL data, with clauses that included a plain verb favouring an

overt subject noun phrase compared to clauses with other verb types This was, however, far

from the most important constraint. Our Auslan results illustrate more parallels with ASL and

spoken languages, with both person and number and language contact also being significant

factors. Clauses with first person singular reference significantly favoured the presence of a

subject noun phrase, whereas all other types of person and number did not. English influences

in the clause (such as the use of the two-handed manual alphabet to represent English lexical

items on the hands) also significantly favoured overt subject expression.

Importantly, our study also demonstrated short-term structural priming effects, and

represents the first study to report these effects in naturalistic sign language data (cf.,

Emmorey, 2001). The subset of coreferential clauses in our data were coded for the form of

the antecedent subject (i.e., as either an overt noun phrase or not) in the immediately

preceding clause. Quantitative analysis of this coded data showed that explicit subject noun

phrases were significantly more likely to immediately follow other explicit subject noun

phrases in both the Auslan and NZSL data. An example from the Auslan data is shown below:

(1) PRO-1 COME-TO-MIND. PRO-1 NEVER FORGET

I recall (this). I will never forget (it)

Despite the overall tendency for co-referential clauses to favour subject deletion, like those in

(1), this only accounts for a portion of the data. Even in cases where there is no switch

reference, subjects are still explicit around 25% of the time in the Auslan data. This suggests

that co-reference, verb morphology, person and number and English influence are only some

of the factors that affect subject expression in Auslan, and our analysis shows that short-term

structural priming is also at work. This finding has particularly profound implications for

models of grammar, as it indicates, as suggested by usage-based models, that grammar “...is

developed on-line, as a response to and deriving from what precedes” in the discourse (Travis,

2007: 132).

10. Conclusion

This paper has presented a number of cases from studies investigating sign language

sociolinguistic variation and change which present various different kinds of evidence for

usage-based grammar. The evidence for a role for an interaction between cognitive storage of

particular exemplars of signs and grammatical constructions draws on the following facts

which these studies are the first to reveal for sign languages. First, we have identified a

relationship between phonological variation and lexical frequency in signs made at the

forehead location in Auslan and NZSL and in those made with the 1 handshape in BSL.

Second, we have also shown a relationship between morphological variation and lexical

frequency in indicating verbs in Auslan. Third, we have found evidence for short-term

structural priming in variable subject noun phrase presence in Auslan.

These facts all highlight the important relationship between sign language phonology,

morphology and syntax and the cognitive organisation of language experience. We see in this

data, as Bybee (2006: 730) has pointed out, that “...usage feeds into the creation of grammar

just as much as grammar determines the shape of usage. Actual language use...constitutes a

large part of the explanation for why languages have grammar and what form that grammar

takes”. A theory of grammar that proposes a notion of ‘pure abstract structure’ that underlies

language use cannot provide us with explanations for the patterns in sign language variation

and change that we have outlined here. Cognitive/functional usage-based models of language,

however, can make reference to the general cognitive abilities that form a basis for

understanding the data we have described: the importance of repetition for the entrenchment

of particular patterns of phonological variation and morphological modification, and the

memory and representation of constructions in the preceding discourse as the template for the

production of new constructions. Bybee (2006) concludes that these cognitive abilities,

working in tandem with other functions of language use in context (such as reference-tracking

and signally turn-taking, see Haiman, 1994) provide a basis for the understanding of

grammar, in both signed and spoken languages, as the ritualisation of frequently repeated

phonological, morphological and syntactic routines.

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