PINKY EXTENSION IN AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE: EVIDENCE FOR A LEXICALLY RESTRICTED MORPHOLOGICAL PROCESS
Graduation Semester and Year
Spring 2026
Language
English
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics
Department
Linguistics
First Advisor
Dr. Laurel Stvan
Second Advisor
Dr. Cynthia Kilpatrick
Third Advisor
Dr. William G. Vicars
Abstract
This study investigates pinky extension (PE) in American Sign Language (ASL). PE involves extending the pinky finger in signs, even though this feature is not present in standard dictionary representations of those signs. Although PE has been previously described as conveying emphasis, this account does not fully explain its distribution. This study asks whether PE reflects a meaningful part of how signs are structured in ASL, rather than a matter of individual style or variation. Focusing on adjectives, it examines whether PE interacts with sentence position. In ASL, certain adjectives may appear either before (prenominally) or after (postnominally) the noun they modify; though position may affect interpretation, the form of the adjective can remain the same. This study tests whether PE forms are more acceptable in postnominal position and whether they are preferred over forms without PE in that environment.
An acceptability judgment task was conducted using three adjectives (BORING, DEAF, SERIOUS), each produced with and without PE in both positions. Participants judged whether each sentence felt natural to them. They were not informed of the variables under investigation, allowing the study to capture intuitive responses to variation. Results show acceptability varies across sign form and sentence position, but not in a uniform way. While forms with PE were accepted across conditions, they were not consistently preferred in postnominal position, and patterns differed by sign. These findings suggest PE cannot be explained by a single distributional rule or by handshape variation alone. Instead, the findings point to PE as a feature dependent on meaning and structure, tied to specific signs. Such an account is consistent with analyses that treat this patterning as part of the internal morphological structure of individual signs. More broadly, these findings demonstrate that variation in ASL reflects underlying grammatical organization.
Keywords
Acceptability Judgments, Adjective Position, Forensic Authorship Analysis, Generative AI, Lexically Restricted Morphology, Morphology, Online Research Methods, Phonology, Pinky Extension, Signed Language Morphology
Disciplines
Applied Linguistics | Linguistics | Morphology
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Recommended Citation
Whitsett, Laurel, "PINKY EXTENSION IN AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE: EVIDENCE FOR A LEXICALLY RESTRICTED MORPHOLOGICAL PROCESS" (2026). Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations. 4.
https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/linguistics_tesol_dissertations2/4
Comments
Supported in part by the following, with gratitude: