Iconic Locations in Swedish Sign Language: Mapping Form to Meaning with Lexical Databases

摘要

In this paper, we describe a method for mapping the phonological feature location of Swedish Sign Language (SSL) signs to the meanings in the Swedish semantic dictionary SALDO. By doing so, we observe clear differences in the distribution of meanings associated with different locations on the body. The prominence of certain locations for specific meanings clearly point to iconic mappings between form and meaning in the lexicon of SSL, which pinpoints modality-specific properties of the visual modality.