The Spreading Hand Autosegment of American Sign Language

Abstract

The Hand Tier (HT) model presented here can account for sign language sign structure by showing hand configuration associating with location and movement on the segmental tier. This model preserves the structural and functional importance of location, movement, and hand configuration, and reveals special properties of the hand tier, which spreads across signs according to its own timetable. Structural relationships among signs in the lexicon, as well as productive phonological and morphological rules, provide evidence that this model can account for surface data in a way that reveals key information about the core of ASL structure.