The field of language documentation continues to grow, but an historic split between sign language documentation and spoken language documentation persists. In order to fully understand the linguistic context within a community, it can be necessary to overcome this split by designing language documentation projects to address threatened and…

This work categorizes Japanese Sign Language (JSL) toponyms, or place names, and examines factors that potentially affect their structure. Exonyms, influenced by the source Japanese name, and endonyms, independent JSL names, contrast structurally in that exonyms tend to emerge as compounds while endonyms conform more closely to canonical…

This article reports the findings of a study undertaken to document and explain the use of English in signage in Costa Rica, a Spanish-speaking country. The linguistic landscape has emerged as an important, viable field of research. In order to investigate how, when, and why the use of English manifests itself, a corpus of 169 photographs of signs…

To date, there has not been any research conducted on the South Sudanese Deaf community and South Sudanese Sign Language (SSSL). This article presents an introductory note about both with information gained from personal observations of the authors and from online resources. It provides an insight for furthering extensive research on the newest…

The following article looks into the question of negative affixation in Polish Sign Language. Until today only one negative prefix and one negative suffix were recognized in Polish Sign Language. Our research investigates farther these two affixes looking into their etymologies, constraints and new examples of their use. The negative prefix…

From the point of word formation, the phenomenon of lexical blending is a common productive process, entailing the notion of combination of lexemes in so many languages. In the vast majority of literature on blends, they preserve a linear formation of segments with a shortening of both lexemes. However, in sign languages where morphological…

The aim of this paper is to advance an understanding of power in linguistic landscape research. After setting out and discussing the concepts of 'power over', 'power to' and 'power through', we present a case study of Chinese semiotic assemblages in the Australian regional city of Bendigo. Our research includes ethnographic details of the…

This study adopts an apparent-time diachronic linguistic landscape (LL) approach to investigate the vitality of an ethnic minority language in China, namely the Nuosu Yi ([foreign characters omitted]). Diachronic LL research is concerned with changes in language use on signage over time. It provides insights into phenomena such as language shift,…

In this article, we provide an overview of the last twenty years of research on Indigenous sign languages, deaf community sign languages, co-speech gesture, and multimodal communication in the Australian context. From a global perspective, research on sign languages and on the gestures that normally accompany speech has been used as the basis for…

In this paper, I discuss methodological and ethical issues that arose in the process of documenting lexical variation in Yucatec Maya Sign Languages (YMSLs). YMSLs are indigenous sign languages used by deaf and hearing people in Yucatec Maya villages with a high incidence of deafness in the peninsula of Yucatán, Mexico. The documentation of rural…

One of the fundamental issues for a language is its capacity to express argument structure unambiguously. This study presents evidence for the emergence and the incremental development of these basic mechanisms in a newly developing language, Central Taurus Sign Language. Our analyses identify universal patterns in both the emergence and…

By providing evidence that sign language is an autonomous language, research has contributed to various changes both within and beyond the signing communities. The aim of this article is to present an example of how sign language change is driven not only by language-internal factors but also by changes in language perception, as well as in the…

In this article, we examine various strategies used to express cardinal numbers in Yucatec Maya Sign Languages (YMSLs) from three historically unrelated communities in Yucatán, Mexico: Chicán, Nohkop, and Cepeda Peraza. Our findings describe some numeral strategies, which remained unattested in previous accounts, and demonstrate that YMSL numerals…

This article looks at the presence of Italian in the linguistic landscape (LL) of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Rather surprisingly, Italian is quite visible, and it might even be the most used European language after English. After a general introduction on the Italian language and Malaysia, including the latter's LL, the article goes on to outline the…

This article presents selected research on applied linguistics published in New Zealand, following "Language Teaching's" commitment to showcase more broadly local research that would not otherwise be easily accessible to an international audience. It covers research conducted and published in New Zealand from 2013 to 2017, following on…