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 AlSayyid 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.language genesis ͉ sign language ͉ word order L anguage is universal to all cultures but bafflingly diverse in its actual instantiations. Since the earliest recorded history (cf. Herodotus, History, 2.2), people have felt that new languages could provide a window into the fundamental nature of all human language. Recently, it has been suggested that pidgin and creole languages, new languages that result from contact between existing languages, constitute such a window (1, 2). The newly created sign language of Nicaragua (3, 4) has also been adduced as a possible example. But creoles and Nicaraguan sign language were created in unusual social and linguistic environments, which are not characteristic of the use, acquisition and transmission of language in a typical human society. Creoles were created under circumstances of social and linguistic discontinuities, the coming together of people with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The sign language under study in Nicaragua is passed from cohort to cohort in the school and was neither fostered nor transmitted in a family and community setting. These unusual circumstances may have an effect on the linguistic structure of the emerged languages. To neutralize such possible effects, one must look for a language that had arisen spontaneously within a socially stable community. The sign language of Martha's Vineyard (5) was such a language, but that language disappeared a century or so ago and was never described.This report contains a linguistic description of a new and isolated language, a sign language created spontaneously without any apparent external influence in a stable existing community. We have found that one of the most important organizing principles in language, the grammatical relation between subject (S), object (O), and verb (V) in an utterance, has been fixed at a very...

Sign languages have two strikingly different kinds of morphological structure: sequential and simultaneous. The simultaneous morphology of two unrelated sign languages, American and Israeli Sign Language, is very similar and is largely inflectional, while what little sequential morphology we have found differs significantly and is derivational. We show that at least two pervasive types of inflectional morphology, verb agreement and classifier constructions, are iconically grounded in spatiotemporal cognition, while the sequential patterns can be traced to normal historical development. We attribute the paucity of sequential morphology in sign languages to their youth. This research both brings sign languages much closer to spoken languages in their morphological structure and shows how the medium of communication contributes to the structure of languages.* Si l'on pouvait inventer une langue dont les dictions eussent leur signification naturelle, de sorte que tous les hommes entendissent la pensée des autres à la seule prononciation sans en avoir appris la signification, comme ils entendent que l'on se rejoueit lorsque l'on rit, et que l'on est triste quand on pleure, cette langue serait la meilleure de toutes les possibles; car elle ferait la mesme impression sur tous les auditeurs, que feraient les pensées de l'esprit si elles se pouvaient immédiatement communiquer entre les hommes comme entre les Anges. (Mersenne, Harmonie universelle, 1636) [If one could invent a language whose expressions had their natural signification, so that all men could understand the thought of others by pronunciation alone without having learned its signification, as they understand that one is happy when one laughs, and that one is sad when one cries, this language would be the best of all possible: for it would make the same impression on all hearers as would the thoughts of the spirit if they could be communicated immediately between men as between the angels.] [our translation] If humans could communicate by telepathy, there would be no need for a phonological component, at least for the purposes of communication; and the same extends to the use of language generally. (Noam Chomsky, The minimalist program, 1995:221)

The division of linguistic structure into a meaningless (phonological) level and a meaningful level of morphemes and words is considered a basic design feature of human language. Although established sign languages, like spoken languages, have been shown to be characterized by this bifurcation, no information has been available about the way in which such structure arises. We report here on a newly emerging sign language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, which functions as a full language but in which a phonological level of structure has not yet emerged. Early indications of formal regularities provide clues to the way in which phonological structure may develop over time.

The notion of subject in human language has a privileged status relative to other arguments. This special status is manifested in the behavior of subjects at the morphological, syntactic, semantic and discourse levels. Here we bring evidence that subjects have privileged status at the lexical level as well, by analyzing lexicalization patterns of verbs in three different sign languages. Our analysis shows that the sublexical structure of iconic signs denoting state of affairs in these languages manifests an inherent pattern of form-meaning correspondence: the signer's body consistently represents one argument of the verb, the subject. The hands, moving in relation to the body, represent all other components of the event - including all other arguments. This analysis shows that sign languages provide novel evidence in support of the centrality of the notion of subject in human language. It also solves a typological puzzle about the apparent primacy of object in sign language verb agreement, a primacy not usually found in spoken languages, in which subject agreement ranks higher. Our analysis suggests that the subject argument is represented by the body and is part of the lexical structure of the verb. Because it is always inherently represented in the structure of the sign, the subject is more basic than the object, and tolerates the omission of agreement morphology.