Argument marking in a new sign language

While there has been no recognized sign language in Vanuatu and no record of intergenerational transmission of language between deaf people, a cohort of deaf children have been attending a school in Port Vila. Previous reports of the gathering together of deaf people, specifically deaf children, have documented the emergence of new sign languages. Studies of emerging sign languages show that linguistic devices for marking argument structure, including word order and grammatical use of space, emerge over time through intergenerational transmission. We examine longitudinal emergence of these devices in the first cohort of a new sign language in Vanuatu. Participants include six deaf children from Vanuatu (ages 8-14, mean 11.6), four of whom had 5-14 months of exposure to Fiji Sign Language. Spontaneous descriptions of sixteen transitive events were elicited using a communicative task. Data were collected 1.5 years after the establishment of the signing community in Vanuatu, and then again one year later. We measured a variety of argument marking strategies: word order, split events, constructed action, assigning characters to present individuals, use of space in marking arguments, spatial modulation of verb, and use of semantic classifiers. Comparing time one and time two rates of argument differentiation strategies in the deaf children, we found a decrease in constructed action and an increase in the use of spatial marking of arguments, classifiers, and spatial modulation of verbs, with few changes in word order. Comparison of these argument marking strategies with those used by thirteen children in Fiji Sign Language, suggests that the change in argument marking is not due to language contact but is arising from sustained community use.