言語の有契性と恣意性をめぐる記号造形 : シナイ文字と手話言語

Abstract

This paper aims to clarify the motivated and arbitrary properties of language from the perspective of pictoriality, based on observations of Sinaitic script and sign language. Sinaitic script, which is a written language and has its roots in hieroglyphs, was a primitive form of arbitrary phonogramic code that later became the Roman alphabet. Sign language serves as communication medium for the deaf and is affected by social conventions and culture to some extent. As with Sinaitic script, sign language is an arbitrary code in which sign vocabulary is symbolically pictorialized by four "parameters" (hand shape, palm orientation, location, and movement) corresponding to morphemes in spoken languages, though it is assumed that sign language preserves ideographic elements. Sinaitic script and sign language have the linguistic properties of pictoriality and expression through pictorial images in common. To be precise, they share the motivated pictoriality. In the process of their development, however, the motivated features of pictoriality got weakened as these two languages gradually lost the connection between pictorial images and those which they denote or the resemblance between the signed and the signified. Sinaitic script and sign language become therefore recognized as encoding arbitrariness at present. To explore the pictorial perspective on the motivated or arbitrary properties, this paper introduces and compares Japanese, German, and American sign languages, which seem to differ in manual sign-forms. It is shown that these different sign languages have certain correlations between motivated and arbitrary signs in common.