Iconicity as a pervasive force in language Evidence from Ghanaian Sign Language and Adamorobe Sign Language

This dissertation investigates various manifestations of iconicity in the visualspatial modality, focusing specifically on Ghanaian Sign Language (GhSL) and Adamorobe Sign Language (AdaSL), used in the village of Adamorobe in Ghana. The dissertation conducts three main empirical analyses comparing GhSL and AdaSL. The data for the analyses were elicited from deaf signers using lexical elicitation and narrative tasks. The first study considers iconicity in GhSL and AdaSL lexical items. This study additionally compares the iconic mappings in signs of the two languages to those in silent gestures produced by hearing non-signers in the surrounding communities. The second study investigates iconicity in the spatial domain, focusing on the iconic use of space to depict location, motion, and action. The third study looks specifically at the use of simultaneous constructions and compares the use of different types of simultaneous constructions between the two sign languages. Finally, the dissertation offers a theoretical analysis of the data across all three studies from a cognitive linguistics perspective on iconicity in language. © 2023 John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved.