M.A. Theses in Linguistics at the University of North Dakota (Abstracts)

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Jones, Vanessa 2013
Numeral incorporation in American Sign Language

Numeral incorporation is a moderately productive process in ASL which combines a
numeral and a base to form a compounded fully formed sign. Numeral-incorporated signs
involve some sort of simultaneity of the base and the numeral. I interviewed six
individuals who use ASL as their primary language in order to gather examples of
numeral-incorporated signs in ASL, thus getting a sampling of variation in the American
deaf community.

Traditionally, numeral incorporation has been viewed as a process of combining a
numeral sign with a noun, which I call a source sign. Instead, I found that the source
signs are separate lexical items and are different than the bases used in numeral
incorporation. While some of these source signs are homophonous with certain numeral-
incorporated forms, others are different. Incorporation also occurs when the forms of the
source and incorporated signs are different or when no source sign corresponds to the
base.

Numeral-incorporated signs are formed from a numeral and a base. Some numeral-
incorporated signs can be modified with additional derivational morphology while others
cannot. Incorporated bases can be grouped into categories that have phonetic or semantic
similarities. Also, the production of numeral-incorporated signs varies between signers
and sometimes for one signer. The pronunciation of any one numeral-incorporated sign
can vary in handshape, orientation, or movement. The numeral ranges for which
numerals can incorporate into numeral-incorporated signs also vary according to signer
and according to the base.

Numeral-incorporated signs can be represented autosegmentally using Sandler’s
hand-tier diagrams. The hand-tier diagrams show the features of the numeral and the base
as well as the resulting compound. The hand-tier diagrams can also show signer
variation.

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