Frontmatter -- Preface -- Contents -- Notational conventions -- Sign language acronyms -- 1. Introduction -- I. Phonetics, phonology, and prosody -- 2. Phonetics -- 3. Phonology -- 4. Visual prosody -- II. Morphology -- 5. Word classes and word formation -- 6. Plurality -- 7. Verb agreement -- 8. Classifiers -- 9. Tense, aspect, and modality -- 10. Agreement auxiliaries -- 11. Pronouns -- III. Syntax -- 12. Word order -- 13. The noun phrase -- 14. Sentence types -- 15. Negation -- 16. Coordination and subordination -- 17. Utterance reports and constructed action -- IV. Semantics and pragmatics -- 18. Iconicity and metaphor -- 19. Use of sign space -- 20. Lexical semantics: Semantic fields and lexical aspect -- 21. Information structure -- 22. Communicative interaction -- V. Communication in the visual modality -- 23. Manual communication systems: evolution and variation -- 24. Shared sign languages -- 25. Language and modality -- 26. Homesign: gesture to language -- 27. Gesture -- VI. Psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics -- 28. Acquisition -- 29. Processing -- 30. Production -- 31. Neurolinguistics -- 32. Atypical signing -- VII. Variation and change -- 33. Sociolinguistic aspects of variation and change -- 34. Lexicalization and grammaticalization -- 35. Language contact and borrowing -- 36. Language emergence and creolisation -- 37. Language planning -- VIII. Applied issues -- 38. History of sign languages and sign language linguistics -- 39. Deaf education and bilingualism -- 40. Interpreting -- 41. Poetry -- IX. Handling sign language data -- 42. Data collection -- 43. Transcription -- 44. Computer modelling -- Indexes -- Index of subjects -- Index of sign languages -- Index of spoken languages