Merits of a Historical Database: Connecting Meaning and Form Across the History of ASL

Ted Supalla (Georgetown University)

This presentation showcases a thorough and meticulously detailed investigation, one that is committed to deepening our understanding of the historical depth and the developmental trajectory of American Sign Language (ASL) by emphasizing the significance of a historical database for safeguarding ASL’s heritage. This database project facilitates the identification of sources, the chronological arrangement of lexical variations, and the documentation of morphological rules. The benefits of such a database are manifold, including the revitalization of ASL stewardship, the enhancement of sign language typology and origins, and the advancement of etymological research toward a more empirical approach.

Ultimately, this infrastructural initiative strives to establish connections between meaning and sign formation across the timeline of ASL. It addresses the current concerns about selective research methodologies, which may be vulnerable to biases that assume uniformity and prescribe norms. The project also confronts the challenges involved in deciphering and interpreting trends distributed across periodic data points. Such analysis uncovers the inherent linearity and cyclicality in the constraint-based reanalysis of language. Consequently, this sheds light on the polysemy and metaphorization present within the semantic and morphosyntactic remnants found in the ASL lexicon and its morphology.