Sandler Wendy, Meir Irit, Padden Carol, Aronoff Mark
Department of English Language and Literature, University of Haifa, 31905 Haifa, Israel.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2005 Feb 15;102(7):2661-5. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0405448102. Epub 2005 Feb 7.
This report contains a linguistic description of a language created spontaneously without any apparent external influence in a stable existing community. We describe the syntactic structure of Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, a language that has arisen in the last 70 years in an isolated endogamous community with a high incidence of nonsyndromic, genetically recessive, profound prelingual neurosensory deafness. In the space of one generation from its inception, systematic grammatical structure has emerged in the language. Going beyond a conventionalized list of words for actions, objects, people, characteristics, and so on, a systematic way of marking the grammatical relations among those elements has appeared in the form of highly regular word order. These systematic structures cannot be attributed to influence from other languages, because the particular word orders that appear in Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language differ from those found both in the ambient spoken languages in the community and in the other sign language found predominantly in the surrounding area. Therefore, the emerging grammatical structures should be regarded as an independent development within the language.
本报告包含对一种在稳定的现存社群中自发产生、无明显外部影响的语言的语言学描述。我们描述了阿尔-赛义德贝都因手语的句法结构，这种语言在过去70年里出现在一个与世隔绝的族内通婚社群中，该社群非综合征性、基因隐性、先天性深度神经感觉性耳聋的发病率很高。从其诞生起的一代人时间内，这种语言中出现了系统的语法结构。除了关于动作、物体、人物、特征等的常规化词汇列表之外，以高度规则的词序形式出现了一种标记这些元素之间语法关系的系统方式。这些系统结构不能归因于其他语言的影响，因为阿尔-赛义德贝都因手语中出现的特定词序与该社群周围的口语语言以及周边地区主要使用的另一种手语中的词序都不同。因此，新出现的语法结构应被视为该语言内部的独立发展。
