Towards a Fractal Analysis of the Sign Language

ABSTRACT

In this paper, it is the first attempt to discuss and explore a possible extension of Hřebíček’s conjecture about a fractal structure of language from a natural language to a sign language. We will show that the approach by means of four versions of a formula for the Menzerath-Altmann law sensitively depends especially on a suitable segmentation of a given sign language structure and the way how to measure the length of sign language units. Some concrete examples of supporting arguments for the fractal structure of the sign language will be given in terms of the Czech sign language.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation under Grant No. 17-18149S “Theoretical Basis for Teaching Czech Sign Language Tested through Quantitative Linguistic Methods”. We are indebted to our colleagues Dan Faltýnek and Miroslav Rypka for fruitful discussions and a technical help during the preparation of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Grantová Agentura České Republiky [17-18149S].