A Study Of Handshape Phonemes In Shanghai Sign Language

This thesis mainly discusses the phonemic status of the handshapes in Shanghai sign language. The thesis first summarized the handshapes from the collected data with a vocabulary of more than3382signs in Shanghai sign language, through transcribing all the handshapes which occur in these signs by means of the notation tool ELAN. Altogether there are about different90handshapes summarized from the data, not all of these handshapes are phonemically distinctive, which means some of the handshapes differ only in ways that the replacement of one handshape by another does not really change the meaning of the sign. The second important issue this thesis covers is to identify the phonemic handshapes in Shanghai sign language, mainly by answering the following questions:(1) How can the handshape phonemes be abstracted from phonetic basis?(2) How many different handshapes exist in Shanghai sign language?(3) Are all these handshapes phonologically distinctive? Or is there any phonetically distinctive handshape?(4) If there are phonetically distinctive handshapes, how can we justify their status as variants of other handshape phonemes?(5) How is the frequency of these handshapes distributed? Is such distribution in accordance to previous works? Or is there any difference?(6) Can such distribution tell us something about markedness theory?Under the framework of Prosodic Model (Brentari1998), which is a phonological feature geometry tree designed for sign language, the thesis describes the allophonic variations of handshapes in Shanghai sign language and provides explanations for these handshape allophones. Since phonological features are abstracted from phonetic basis, this thesis tries to discuss the physical effect on phonological features by exploring the physiological explanations for the combination of features [flex] and [spread] in flat handshapes. By doing so, the thesis aims at providing a panoramic view on handshape phoneme inventory in Shanghai sign language and laying a basis for further research on the phonology of Shanghai sign language.