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Abstract：
Over the history of research on sign languages, much scholarship has highlighted the pervasive presence of signs whose forms relate to their meaning in a non-arbitrary way. The presence of these forms suggests that sign language vocabularies are shaped, at least in part, by a pressure toward maintaining a link between form and meaning in wordforms. We use a vector space approach to test the ways this pressure might shape sign language vocabularies, examining how non-arbitrary forms are distributed within the lexicons of two unrelated sign languages. Vector space models situate the representations of words in a multi-dimensional space where the distance between words indexes their relatedness in meaning. Using phonological information from the vocabularies of American Sign Language (ASL) and British Sign Language (BSL), we tested whether increased similarity between the semantic representations of signs corresponds to increased phonological similarity. The results of the computational analysis showed a significant positive relationship between phonological form and semantic meaning for both sign languages, which was strongest when the sign language lexicons were organized into clusters of semantically related signs. The analysis also revealed variation in the strength of patterns across the form-meaning relationships seen between phonological parameters within each sign language, as well as between the two languages. This shows that while the connection between form and meaning is not entirely language specific, there are cross-linguistic differences in how these mappings are realized for signs in each language, suggesting that arbitrariness as well as cognitive or cultural influences may play a role in how these patterns are realized. The results of this analysis not only contribute to our understanding of the distribution of non-arbitrariness in sign language lexicons, but also demonstrate a new way that computational modeling can be harnessed in lexicon-wide investigations of sign languages.
摘要：
在手语研究的历史上，许多奖学金都强调了普遍存在的迹象，其形式与非任意方式有关其含义。这些形式的存在表明手语词汇是成形的，至少在某种程度上,通过压力来维持单词形式和含义之间的联系。我们使用向量空间方法来测试这种压力可能形成手语词汇的方式，检查非任意形式如何在两种不相关的手语的词典中分布。向量空间模型将单词的表示置于多维空间中，其中单词之间的距离将其相关性作为索引。使用来自美国手语（ASL）和英国手语（BSL）词汇的语音信息，我们测试了标志的语义表示之间的相似性增加是否对应于语音相似性增加。计算分析的结果表明，两种手语的语音形式和语义之间都存在显着的正相关关系，当手语词典被组织成语义相关的标志集群时，这是最强的。分析还揭示了每种手语中语音参数之间的形式-意义关系之间的模式强度变化，以及两种语言之间。这表明，虽然形式和意义之间的联系并不完全是语言特有的，在每种语言中的符号如何实现这些映射方面存在跨语言差异，这表明任意性以及认知或文化影响可能在这些模式如何实现中发挥作用。这种分析的结果不仅有助于我们理解手语词典中的非任意性分布，而且还展示了一种新的方法，即计算建模可以用于整个词典范围的手语研究。
