Two-Handed Signs and Handedness: Phonological Implications for Sign Language Structure

Abstract

Handedness —the use of one versus two hands in sign production— has traditionally been discussed in relation to dominance and symmetry conditions, yet it remains underrepresented in formal phonological models of sign languages. This paper argues that handedness constitutes a core phonological parameter that directly influences the structure and interaction of movement, handshape, location, and orientation. Building on hierarchical and dependency-based approaches, we propose an adapted phonological dependency model that explicitly integrates handedness in the representation of manual articulators. In one-handed signs, features are specified for a single active hand. In two-handed signs, feature distribution is constrained by symmetry and dominance conditions, which regulate whether the hands must share features or may differ in a structurally restricted way. This structural encoding accounts for variation phenomena such as weak add, weak prop, and weak drop as constrained adjustments within the phonological system. From a technical perspective, this refinement suggests more formal restrictiveness and empirical discriminability within the feature geometries, reduced representational ambiguity, and improved empirical testability across theoretical, corpus-based, and computational implementations, strengthening the interface between phonological theory and sign language technology.

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