On the Other Hand . . .

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Abstract
Signs can be made with one hand or two and there are minimal pairs where two signs have the same handshape and movement, but differ in being one- or two-handed. The fact that two-handed signs exist has drawn the attention of many sign language researchers. Perhaps this is in part because the articulation of spoken languages does not have an equivalent to something like “two identical articulators”. Another reason is no doubt that not all two-handed signs make use of both hands in the same way. The question of exactly how to formally represent the various types has generated a number of positions. In this article, I take side with those who have argued for a uniform (i.e. isotypic) representation of the weak hand in all two-handed signs. This implies that the ‘extra’ hand is not represented as a feature that annotates structures that are otherwise used for one-handed signs. The fundamental motivation behind this proposal is that asymmetries between properties of the two hands follow the pattern of so-called head-dependent asymmetries (HDAs), as discussed in Dresher and van der Hulst (1995, forthc. a,b), but additional arguments are also presented.