Introduction

Since the mid 1970s, sign language researchers have debated how to analyze signs that denote an entity's motion or state of being located somewhere, signs with some similarity between the sign form and the sign meaning (for an overview of the discussions, see Schembri2003 and papers in Emmorey 2003). One example is seen in Figure 12.1 from a Swedish signer's description of how a boy falls from a tree to the ground. The signer's hands can be seen as representing the boy and some surface related to the tree, respectively, and the movement of her right hand as representing the motion aspects of the boy's fall. Within the framework of functional linguistics and its interest in motivated relations between linguistic form and linguistic meaning (Jakobson 1971, Haiman 1983, Givón 1991, Engberg-Pedersen 1996), this chapter investigates the factors that shape signs like the one in Figure 12.1 and discusses different approaches to their description in the sign linguistics literature.

In a paper on arbitrariness and iconicity in American Sign Language (ASL), Frishberg (1975) introduced the term “classifier” to describe the hands in signs such as ASL MEET, which is made with two index-handshapes (see Appendix) facing each other (see Figure 12.2): “ASL uses the index finger in a vertical orientation as a sort of classifier for human beings” (Frishberg 1975:715). She claims that