Language socialization in homesign via a directive-response trajectory

Homesign languages are ways of communicating innovated by deaf people who have no access to other languages (neither spoken nor signed), with variable degrees of input from their family, friends and wider community. These languages are typically only one or two generations old, and used by very small communities of users. Many properties of homesign have been identified, including word order to mark thematic roles, displaced reference, and narrative discourse. This article expands the list of properties attested in homesign and in so doing, identifies these as properties which do not require multiple generations nor large user communities to develop in a language. I take a language socialization approach and analyze a directive-response trajectory that unfolds between a deaf homesigning father and his hearing daughter living in the rural Highlands of Papua New Guinea. The deaf homesigner is socializing his daughter both in the use of his homesign language, and into the norms and values of their culture at large. Via this vignette, we see evidence of the following properties in this homesign language: (1) arrangement and molding of bodies to facilitate interaction; (2) a wide range of attention-getting strategies; (3) prompting and thus metacommunication; (4) implicit and explicit directives and thus indirectness; and (5) socialization into the local value of reciprocity. This study would appear to be the only study of prompting per se in any sign language; as such, it highlights a fruitful new pathway for research in this domain. It also shows that a deaf embodied habitus, or set of behaviors like body orientation and attention-getting strategies, can be a convergently evolved property of sign languages rather than needing to be culturally transmitted.