Zinacantec Family Home Sign: Structure and Socialization in the First and Second Generations of a Spontaneous Emerging Sign Language

Zinacantec家庭手语(ZFHS)是一种新的手语，在过去的30年里自发出现在墨西哥恰帕斯一个偏远的玛雅印第安人村庄的一个家庭中。它提供了一个独特的机会来探索关于人类语言的性质、起源和进化的基本问题。三个极度失聪的兄弟姐妹，他们的听力同龄人，现在还有他们的婴儿，既没有接触过其他聋人，也没有接触过任何预先存在的手语。通过对ZFHS手语手语的定期录像，该项目将研究(1)新兴手语结构中的形成原则，特别是手语的“便携性”；(2)形态结构的证据，语法范畴和句法的出现；(3)ZFHS和口语Tzotzil之间潜在的类型和结构关系；(4)ZFHS手语在Tzotzil联合言语手势中的可能来源；以及(5)ZFHS言语社区的社会语言学，包括第一代的变异和第二代的新兴语言特性。通过结合对ZFHS的详细语言学和社会语言学分析(成年人的使用证明了这一点)，以及对婴儿双语社会化进入语言的系统纵向研究，该项目将以独特的方式帮助科学理解人类交流需求如何招募、转换和构建时尚语言本身的可视和可听互补情态。对聋人语言的研究，特别是当他们在“自然”条件下进化时，对语言学这一学科和说这种语言的聋人都有改进的贡献。更广泛地说，这项研究将对一个重新引起人们兴趣的老问题做出直接贡献：人类语言是如何创造的，它是如何在不同类型的“语言社区”(甚至是像本例中的最小的社区)中，在历代人类的时间进程中演变和构建自己的。

Zinacantec Family Homesign (ZFHS) is a new sign language which has emerged spontaneously over the past three decades in a single family in a remote Mayan Indian village in Chiapas, Mexico. It provides a unique opportunity to explore fundamental questions about the nature, origins, and evolution of human language. Three profoundly deaf siblings, their hearing age-mates, and now their infant children, have had contact with no other deaf people nor with any pre-existing sign language. Through periodic video recording of ZFHS signers the project will study (1) formational principles in the emerging structure of the sign language, especially the "portability" of signs; (2) evidence of morphological structure, the emergence of grammatical categories and syntax; (3) potential typological and structural relations between ZFHS and spoken Tzotzil; (4) possible sources for ZFHS sign in Tzotzil co-speech gesture; and (5) the sociolinguistics of the ZFHS speech community, including variation in the first generation and emerging linguistic properties in the second. By combining a detailed linguistic and sociolinguistic analysis of ZFHS as evidenced by adult usage with systematic longitudinal study of the infants' bilingual socialization into language, the project will contribute in a unique way to scientific understanding of how human communicative needs recruit, transform, and structure complementary modalities, both visible and audible, to fashion language itself. Research on the languages of the deaf, especially as they evolve in "natural" conditions, has an ameliorative contribution to make both to linguistics as a discipline and to the deaf speakers of such languages. More broadly, this research will make a direct contribution to an old question with resurgent interest: how is human language created, and how does it evolve and structure itself, in different sorts of "speech communities" (even, as in this case, minimal ones) over the time course of successive human generations.