Articulatory plurality is a property of lexical plurals in sign language

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Human language comes in two modalities: the auditory-vocal modality of spoken language and the visual-gestural modality of sign language. In the signed modality, multiple articulators, including the two hands, are used simultaneously. Accordingly, the lexical signs of any sign language can be either one- or twohanded. Though this distinction has traditionally been seen as a purely formal feature, in this study, we develop a principle of articulatory plurality to show that the two hands are systematically recruited to encode lexically plural concepts, across sign languages. We demonstrate this by drawing from lexically two-handed signs across a sample of 10 sign languages in five sign language families.

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