A Diachronic Investigation of the Change in Form and Formational-Semantic Systematicity of the Chinese Sign Language Lexicon

Abstract

It has been argued in previous research that several competing pressures guide the directions of language evolution (economy vs. redundancy; arbitrariness vs. systematicity). For sign languages, however, the effects of competing pressures on their change of lexical systems remain largely unclear. In the present study, we focus on the diachronic change in form and formational-semantic systematicity of the Chinese Sign Language (CSL) lexicon. Drawing on two CSL lexicons (one from the 1960 dictionary and the other from the 2019 dictionary), we found that in the dimension of form, the CSL lexical system shows a trend toward monosyllabicity and symmetry. In terms of formational-semantic systematicity, we found that there is a significant correlation between form and meaning in both lexicons, but the effect of the arbitrariness constraint gets stronger over time. Our findings regarding the change in form indicate that the competing pressures between economy and redundancy have different effects on different parameters when shaping the lexical system of CSL. As for the correlation between form and meaning, our study provides insight as to how a balance between arbitrariness and systematicity is reached.