Hope Morgan is a postdoc at the Centre for Linguistics.

More information about Hope Morgan

I completed my PhD at the University of California San Diego in 2017, writing a phonological grammar of Kenyan Sign Language. My research primarily focuses on the systemic properties of sign language lexicons, guided by the following questions. How do signs emerge and take on categorical formational properties in relation to other signs in a lexicon? How are those forms constrained by communicative and learnability pressures, such as confusability, frequency, articulatory ease, and phonological complexity? And how do meanings become encoded in form within a lexical network, at both the level of surface lexical meaning, as well as in the motivated sub-parts of words, including iconic motivations and metaphoric reference?

Fields of interest

• phonology of sign languages
• morphology of sign languages
• sign language lexicography
• sign languages of Africa
• language evolution

Publications