Introduction

Of the five parameters of sign language structure – handshape, movement, place of articulation, orientation and nonmanual behaviors – handshape is the parameter that has been analyzed most successfully with a variety of methodologies, both theoretical and experimental. Since it is here that we find the most complete body of work to draw upon, we have chosen to examine handshape behavior as a way of better understanding the nature of phonological contrast in signed languages. The goal of this chapter is twofold. First we will draw attention to the range of variation in the form and use of handshapes, and second, we will analyze the distribution of handshape properties. We will also investigate these issues both crosslinguistically and language-internally in order to determine which features are phonologically contrastive and where they are contrastive in the lexicon.

In order to achieve our goal of showing how sign languages use handshape in their phonological systems, a little background is necessary on both the organization of a sign language lexicon and the phonological structure of signed languages. After covering this introductory material and our methodology in sections 1 and 2, we will describe differences in the way that handshape feature classes are used across the three components of the lexicon (foreign, core and spatial) in three different sign languages – namely, American Sign Language (ASL), Swiss German Sign Language (DSGS) and Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL).