This article describes the newly developing form of poetic duets in Libras (Brazilian Sign Language). What do the two people performing a sign language duet poem do to make a duet different from a solo poem? How can we categorize their actions and the effects that these actions create? Drawing on examples of duet poems in Libras, we analyze…

This study contributes to research in the field of phonology of sign languages, focusing on the occurrence of assimilation of signs. The objective of the study is to analyze assimilation cases present in the text genre "joke" in Brazilian Sign Language (Libras), as well as influences of the immediate context on their occurrence. We…

Situations of language contact are often the norm for sign languages. This article investigates a case of unimodal contact between Cena, a young sign language in its third generation that is used in a small rural community in Brazil, and Libras, the national sign language of Brazil. Our analysis concerns one by-product of this contact: reiterative…

Naming spaces is a human act and reflects traces of the culture and social group to which the person who names a place belongs, either in spoken or sign languages. This article presents an analysis of the toponyms in Libras that name the cities of the state of Acre. The toponyms were stored in digital files proposed by Sousa and Quadros (2019),…

Nonmanual articulations in sign languages range from being semantically impoverished to semantically rich, and from being independent of manual articulations to coordinated with them. But, while this range has been well noted, certain nonmanuals remain understudied. Of particular interest to us are nonmanual articulations coordinated with manual…

This article explores the language of bimodal bilinguals (i.e., hearing children of Deaf parents who are exposed to sign language at home and to spoken language in the surrounding community). In similar bilingual contexts involving pairs of spoken languages, the language used at home, which differs from that of the community, is referred to as the…

This article addresses the special challenges associated with collecting longitudinal samples of the spontaneous sign language and spoken language production by young bimodal bilingual children. We discuss the methods used in our study of children in the United States and Brazil. Since one of our goals is to observe both sign language and speech,…

This article explains the consolidation of Brazilian Sign Language in Brazil through a linguistic plan that arose from the Brazilian Sign Language Federal Law 10.436 of April 2002 and the subsequent Federal Decree 5695 of December 2005. Two concrete facts that emerged from this existing language plan are discussed: the implementation of bilingual…

This article first introduces some theoretical considerations concerning the emergence and evolution of sign languages from the semiogenetic perspective. It then presents results from a linguistic study of the phenomenon of lexical stabilization in three emerging sign languages used by Brazilian deaf adults who live in a hearing environment…