Mouthing Constructions in 37 Signed Languages: Typology, Ecology and Ideology

Abstract

The descriptive contribution of this paper is a typology of mouthing constructions in 37 signed languages and an analysis of the ideologies and resources that affect their documentation. The languages are divided into two categories labelled deaf (n=26) and rural (n=11), that are defined based on socio-historical/-cultural properties, but which have been problematised for their conflation of multiple linguistic ecologies (Kusters, 2009: 200; Nyst, 2012; Reed, 2019; Safar, 2020). The analysis is used to argue that phenomena like mouthing are marginalised in documentation, as opposed to marginal, and that the deaf-rural divide tracks differences that are more related to issues of documentation than contexts of language use and emergence. The Semiotic Repertoires approach (Kusters et al., 2017) is used to motivate the unit of analysis, the mouthing construction, and Uniformitarianism in Creole linguistics (Mufwene, 2000; DeGraff, 2005) is used as a lens onto signed language typology.