A Grammar of Turkish Sign Language (TİD)

Regressive handshape assimilation is a common phonological phenomenon observed in TİD compounds. One example is neck^long (‘giraffe’) which exhibits regressive handshape and movement direction assimilation. neck has downwards movement near the neck area with L-Handshape. long, on the other hand is signed with upwards movement with <-Handshape. In the compound, the downwards movement of neck is altered as upwards movement with the <-Handshape of long.

The hand-arrangement features can also assimilate within compounds. For instance, while strong is a two-handed sign, in the compound head^strong (‘stubborn’), the one-handedness feature of head assimilates to strong.

Non-manual features sometimes spread between elements in compounds. Regressive non-manual assimilation is attested in the compound chicken^small(‘chick’). The forward movement of shoulders and head in small spreads to the first element chicken.

Besides assimilation processes, there are two other tendencies in terms of movement direction. Namely, the transition movement from the first to the second input element tends to (i) move away from the body (ii) move downwards. As for move-away tendency, when one of the compound elements has a contact of the hand to the body, this element is predominantly the first element (e.g. man^tall(‘elder brother’)). Moreover, this kind of contact^no-contact compounds are more common than compounds that have contact or no-contact in both elements (e.g. CL(C):'rectangular_shape'^projector(‘projector’)). As a side note, while the former pattern (contact^contact) is rare, the latter (no-contact^no-contact) pattern is relatively common.

The downward-movement tendency is observed in two ways. First, the second element of the compound tends to be lower in signing location than the first compound element. Second, the place of articulation of two elements is predominantly in the order of head-to-torso rather than head-to-head and torso-to-torso. The compounds that have upwards movement is quite rare, soft^sleep(‘pillow’) is one such example.