Petra Eccarius, Purdue University

When analyzing a spoken language, it is unwise to assume that sounds behave or are distributed consistently across the entire language; this is because social and historical factors influence language change unevenly across different types of words. In sign languages, distributional differences are also found between words with varying backgrounds (e.g. ‘core’ words, fingerspelled borrowings, classifiers). This presentation will examine some of the distributional differences for handshape across the ASL lexicon, focusing on which handshape features (e.g. joint positions, finger combinations) are used in various kinds of signs.