A Grammar of Turkish Sign Language (TİD)

1.2. Location

The major locations for the articulation of signs are head, torso, arm, and non-dominant hand (h2). Setting further specifies a major location as either being ipsilateral (right side of a right-handed signer), contralateral (left side of a right-handed signer), low, high, contact, proximal, and distal. Moreover, each location can be specified with an exact setting unique to the major location (e.g. eyes is an exact setting of the major location head). Below, a table with all locations and all exact settings are presented with examples.

Major Loc	Setting	Exact Setting	Example Sign
Arm	Contact	Whole arm	street
Arm	Contact	Elbow	blue_jeans
Arm	High	Upper Arm	yellow
Arm	Low, contact	Lower Arm	hometown
h2	Contact	Dorsal Hand	late
h2	Contact	Fingers	rıde
h2	Contact	Whole hand	orange
h2	Contact	Palm	ınvestıgate
h2	Contact	Radial and Ulnar Lateral Border of the Hand	ınsıde
h2	Contact	Wrist	doctor
Head	Contact	Cheeks	look
Head	Contact	Ear	wednesday
Head	Contact/ Proximal	Eyes	december
Head	Contact	Whole head	poor
Head	Contact	Mouth	red
Head	Contact	Nose	easy
Head	Contact	Upper Head	hot
Head	Proximal	Proximal Face	mırror
Torso	Contact	Whole body	cloth
Torso	Contact	Neck	please
Torso	Contact	Shoulders	new
Torso	High, Contact	Chest	law
Torso	Low	Hips	short
Torso	Low	Pelvis	swımsuıt
Torso	Low, Contact	Abdomen	accusatıon
Torso	Proximal	Proximal Torso	key

(adapted and expanded from Makaroğlu & Dikyuva 2017)

Often the lexical items involve the torso as the major location, and for some signs the location of articulation is the head. Occasionally locations are the non-dominant hand and the arm. The non-dominant hand rarely serves as the major location while the arm is extremely exceptional.

There are other exact settings that are also used very rarely. These are predominantly iconically motivated signs. For example, the exact setting of eyes appear in eye-related words such as eye, eyeglasses, teardrop, brow, and eyelashes (with the exception of december). Other such rarely occuring exact settings that serve as the setting for iconic signs are the body (e.g. cloth, shırt), the pelvis (e.g. swımsuıt), and the hips (e.g. shorts).