Hope Morgan
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I am a research associate and principal investigator for the SemaSign project (ERC-2023-STG) at the Institute of German Sign Language (IDGS) at Universität Hamburg.
My research focuses on the systemic properties of sign language lexicons, with Kenyan Sign Language as the primary language of investigation. This work is guided by the following questions. How do new signs emerge and take on categorical formational properties in relation to other signs in a lexicon; i.e., in their phonology and morphology? How are those forms constrained by communicative and learnability pressures, such as confusability, frequency, articulatory ease, and phonological complexity? How do meanings become encoded in form within a lexical network, at both the level of word meaning, as well as in the motivated sub-parts of words, such as iconic motivations and metaphoric reference?
I lived in the southwestern part of Kenya (formerly called the South Nyanza region) for two years, learning Kenyan Sign Language at Kuja Primary School for the Deaf, and have returned several times to western Kenya for fieldwork to work with KSL signers. I am also a graduate of the Anthropogeny program at UC San Diego (where I completed my PhD in 2017), which has taken me to few key research sites in the Tanzanian Rift Valley.
My research focuses on the systemic properties of sign language lexicons, with Kenyan Sign Language as the primary language of investigation. This work is guided by the following questions. How do new signs emerge and take on categorical formational properties in relation to other signs in a lexicon; i.e., in their phonology and morphology? How are those forms constrained by communicative and learnability pressures, such as confusability, frequency, articulatory ease, and phonological complexity? How do meanings become encoded in form within a lexical network, at both the level of word meaning, as well as in the motivated sub-parts of words, such as iconic motivations and metaphoric reference?
I lived in the southwestern part of Kenya (formerly called the South Nyanza region) for two years, learning Kenyan Sign Language at Kuja Primary School for the Deaf, and have returned several times to western Kenya for fieldwork to work with KSL signers. I am also a graduate of the Anthropogeny program at UC San Diego (where I completed my PhD in 2017), which has taken me to few key research sites in the Tanzanian Rift Valley.
