Research Interests:

My research focuses on language change and grammaticalization in sign languages of the world. By comparing language change in the signed and spoken modalities, we can discover the cognitive motivations driving language change that may be obfuscated by the spoken modality. My dissertation focuses on the recent emergence of the copular function of an ASL sign, SELF and its variant, SELF-ONE, shown below. A corpus study encompassing 200 years of ASL and one of its language predecessors, Langue de Signes Française (French Sign Language, LSF) showed a grammaticalization process termed 'the copular cycle' (Sampson & Mayberry 2022). In this cycle, the function of a lexical item evolves from a demonstrative to a personal pronoun, and, finally, to a copula. This parallels similar copula cycles observed in spoken languages including Hebrew, Mandarin, Turkish, and Finnish (Katz 1996). The similarities of the same grammaticalization pathway between signed and spoken languages ultimately show that universal cognitive underpinnings are responsible for grammaticalization processes despite differences in modality.