Abstract

The division of morphological processes into two general categories in spoken/written languages, into concatenative and non-concatenative ones, can with some due reservations also be applied to sign languages, assuming there is a certain degree of correspondence between sequentiality and concatenative process on the one hand, and between simultaneity and non-concatenative patterns on the other. This correlation is far from being perfect, but largely holds. Both concatenative and non-concatenative morphology is present in sign languages, but there is, generally, far more non-concatenative morphology than in spoken/written languages. We might hypothesize that we should therefore expect to see more lexical blending as a non-concatenative word-formation pattern in sign languages than in spoken/written languages. In view of the available data, examples of blending in sign languages are relatively rare, especially when it comes to its canonical forms. What is considered as a frequent type of blending in sign languages is very similar in nature to multimodal constructions involving text and image integration. This phenomenon is brought here into connection with finger-spelling and initialization in sign languages.