Glossary

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Chinese Natural Sign Language(also: CNSL)

Chinese Natural Sign Language (CNSL) is the language used by roughly twenty million Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing people in China. Unlike Chinese Sign Language (CSL) — an artificial, school-and-broadcast system that follows spoken Mandarin word order — CNSL has its own spatial-visual…

Classifiers (Sign Language)(also: Classifier Predicates, CL (Sign Language))

Productive handshape-based constructions in sign languages that represent a class of referents — a vehicle, a flat object, a person walking, a small round object — and show their location, movement, shape, and interaction in signing space. Classifiers are a core part of ASL…

Iconicity(also: Iconic Motivation, Sign Iconicity)

A property of a linguistic sign in which its form resembles or is motivated by its meaning, rather than being arbitrary. In sign languages, iconicity is pervasive: many signs visually depict an action, shape, or spatial relationship associated with the referent (for example,…

Lexical Signing(also: Lexical Sign, LS)

In American Sign Language and related signed languages, the production of meaning by syntactically combining individual lexical signs drawn from the language's vocabulary — analogous to combining words into sentences in a spoken or written language. Lexical signing is contrasted…

Mouth Morphemes(also: Mouth Gestures, Mouthing (ASL), Adverbial Mouth Morphemes)

Non-manual mouth configurations in sign languages that carry grammatical or adverbial meaning independent of the words they accompany. In American Sign Language, mouth morphemes include patterns such as "mm" (relaxed, normal), "cha" (large), "oo" (small or close), "th" (careless…

Referential Drift

Referential drift is a failure mode in AI-generated sign language where spatial loci — the established positions in signing space used to refer to people, objects, or locations — shift or are not maintained consistently across a sentence. Because signed languages use spatial…

Role Shifting(also: Referential Shift, Constructed Action)

A narrative device in American Sign Language (and many other sign languages) in which a signer takes on the persona, gaze, and body posture of a character in a story, dropping the default "narrator" framing. Role shifting is marked by a subtle shift in the signer's body, head…

Semantic Grounding(also: Meaning Grounding, Form-Meaning Mapping)

A design principle in which practice or interaction is accompanied by explanations that connect the form of an action to its underlying meaning, rather than treating the action as an arbitrary symbol to memorise. In sign language learning, semantic grounding pairs a sign with…

Spatial Grammar(also: Spatial Syntax)

Spatial grammar is the set of grammatical rules that signed languages express through the three-dimensional signing space in front of the signer, rather than through linear word order. Signers establish referents at specific spatial loci, use directional verbs that agree with…

Spatial Reference (ASL)(also: Spatial Reference Point, Locus, ASL Spatial Reference)

In American Sign Language and other signed languages, the use of points in the signing space in front of the signer as invisible placeholders for entities under discussion — people, objects, or concepts. A signer may point to, sign near, or direct eye gaze toward a particular…

Topicalization(also: Topic-Comment Structure)

A grammatical construction common in American Sign Language and other sign languages in which the topic of a sentence is placed first and marked by non-manual signals — typically raised eyebrows, a head tilt, and a brief pause — followed by a comment about that topic. For…

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