morphemesigns

Morphemesigns is a term used in linguistics to describe signs that function as morphemes within a sign language or signed communication system. A morpheme sign is a sign that carries a discrete semantic or grammatical meaning that cannot be reduced into smaller meaningful units within the language’s morphology. The concept parallels the idea of morphemes in spoken languages, but draws attention to the multimodal realization of morphology in sign languages, where movement, location, handshape, and non-manual markers contribute to the realization of a morpheme.

In sign languages, morphological information is often conveyed through sign parameters, repetition, and movement rather than separate phonological units. Morpheme signs can be free morphemes, which function as standalone lexical items, or bound morphemes, which attach to other signs by modifying movement, directionality, or spatial indexing. Examples include aspectual or temporal markers, plurality markers, and agreement or pronoun indexing realized as modified signs or sequences.

The term is chiefly used in theoretical discussions of sign language morphology and is not universally adopted. Some scholars prefer to describe the same facts in terms of grammatical signs, affixation, or allomorphy in signed languages rather than as a separate category.

Further study often relies on glossed data and annotation conventions to represent morpheme signs and their allomorphic variants. See also morpheme, sign language, morphology.