Testing “Message-Oriented” Phonology in the Signed Modality
Kathleen Currie Hall, University of British Columbia
Message-Oriented Phonology (MOP; see Hall et al. 2016, 2018, but also Ohala 1981, Lindblom
1990, and Bybee 2001 for earlier underpinnings) situates language as part of a communication
system. Generally speaking, MOP claims that the existence of many phonological patterns canbe explained as the result of trade-offs between the likelihood of accurate transmission ofparticular messages (e.g., morphemes, words) and the amount of effort that would be involved in
producing them.
One overarching prediction of MOP, then, is that the particular words that a message is incompetition with will govern the type and extent of phonetic variability that occurs in theirproduction, and hence in the long term, what phonological patterns will arise. This competition
can take multiple forms: the overall number and type of competitors across the entire lexicon of alanguage (neighbourhood density; e.g., Scarborough 2013), the simple existence of so-called‘minimal pair’ competitors in the lexicon (e.g., Baese-Berk & Goldrick 2009), or the contextual
presence of such competitors within a particular communicative situation (e.g., Buz et al. 2016).
In general, MOP predicts that the most lexically informative parts of words will tend to bepreserved and/or enhanced, while the least lexically informative parts of words will tend to belost or reduced.
If this general approach to phonology is correct, it makes the very clear prediction that
analogous phonological patterns should in fact be found in signed languages, and specifically besimilar to the patterns in spoken languages to the extent that sign language lexicons and contexts
are similar. Others have similarly recognized that signed languages provide an excellent meansof understanding the very nature of phonological structure (e.g., Sandler et al. 2011); MOP
extends this line of reasoning to predict that the various patterns within a phonological system
are also consequences of the system’s being used for communicative purposes (cf. Börstell et al.
2016).
In this presentation, I will review some of the specific predictions that MOP makes forphonological structures and illustrate how they might be extended to the signed modality. In thecourse of the discussion, I will introduce some of the tools we have been developing at UBC tohelp facilitate such testing, including the concept of Visible Amplitude to measure the averageamount of movement across frames in a video (Tkachman et al. 2019) and Sign Language
Phonetic Annotator-Analyzer, software to facilitate the phonetic transcription of signed
languages (Hall et al. 2017; Lo & Hall 2019).
References:
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Börstell, C., Hörberg, T., & Östling, R. (2016). Distribution and duration of signs and parts ofspeech in Swedish Sign Language. Sign Language & Linguistics, 19(2), 143-196.
doi:https://doi.org/10.1075/sll.19.2.01bor

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Hall, K. C., Hume, E., Jaeger, T. F., & Wedel, A. (2016). The message shapes phonology.
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