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

Zinacantec Family Homesign（ZFHS）是一种新的手语，在过去的三十年里，在墨西哥恰帕斯州一个偏远的玛雅印第安村庄的一个家庭中自发出现。它提供了一个独特的机会，探索有关人类语言的性质，起源和进化的基本问题。 三个严重失聪的兄弟姐妹，他们的听力同龄人，现在他们的婴儿，没有与其他聋人接触，也没有任何预先存在的手语。通过对ZFHS手语者的定期录像，该项目将研究（1）手语新兴结构的形成原则，特别是手势的“可移植性”;（2）形态结构的证据，语法类别和句法的出现;（3）ZFHS和口语Tzotzil之间潜在的类型学和结构关系;（4）ZFHS手势在Tzotzil共同语手势中的可能来源;（5）ZFHS手势的形成原则。（5）ZFHS言语社区的社会语言学，包括第一代的变异和第二代出现的语言特征。通过结合ZFHS的详细的语言学和社会语言学分析，证明了成人的使用与婴儿的双语社会化到语言的系统的纵向研究，该项目将有助于在一个独特的方式来科学地理解人类的交际需求如何招聘，转换和结构的补充形式，无论是可见的和可听的，时尚的语言本身。对聋人语言的研究，特别是对聋人在“自然”条件下发展的语言的研究，对语言学作为一门学科和聋人使用这种语言都有改善性的贡献。更广泛地说，这项研究将对一个古老的问题做出直接贡献，重新引起人们的兴趣：人类语言是如何产生的，以及它是如何在不同类型的“言语社区”（即使是最小的）中进化和结构自己的，在人类连续几代人的时间过程中。

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.