There's a very nice sign in ASL to describe this article. It uses two hands, and one of them is a fist with the index and little fingers extended, like the hor

There's a very nice sign in ASL to describe this article. It uses two hands, and one of them is a fist with the index and little fingers extended, like the horns of a bull. (1) I'm pretty sure it was Klima and Bellungi's book The Signs of Language that pointed out that arm muscles are slower than vocal muscles, and therefore ASL does things that spoken languages can't do in order to maintain the same communication bandwidth. (That book was written ten years ago.) (2) The handshape is only a very small part of what conveys meaning in sign language; one of the classic newbie mistakes in learning ASL is to look at your conversation partner's hands, rather than his or her eyes. A great deal of grammatical information is communicated purely by facial expression; for example, raised eyebrows can indicate a yes/no question, lowered eyebrows can indicate a wh-question, and just looking in one direction or shifting the body slightly can substitute for a pronoun. There are also movements of the mouth that act as adverbial modifiers for a sign, to indicate things like "almost", "carelessly", "with difficulty", "distant in time or space", and a whole bunch of other stuff. (3) With regard to the hand and arm movements themselves, the location and movement of the signs are as significant as the handshape. The signs for "father" and "mother" differ only in location. The signs for "paper" and "cheese" differ only in movement. Skimming the article, it appears that the authors didn't bother taking location and movement because linguists disagree on how to categorize those other features. But that's no excuse for completely leaving them out of your analysis. That's methodological laziness. (4) Modulation of movement also has grammatical significance which in English would be conveyed by modal verbs or adverbs. For example, a change in how you make the sign for "to be red" turns it into "to become red". The Klima and Bellungi book above has more of this kind of thing. (5) There's also the ASL classifier system, which provides a concise way of using the relative position and motion of hands to indicate the relative position and motion of objects in physical or metaphorical space. I once saw a lecture at which a woman very eloquently used this to describe herself advancing through all four years of her college education while a friend of hers kept repeating her "prep" year. (Gallaudet has a pre-freshman year for students who, thanks to the ocean of suck that is the American deaf-ed system, don't arrive with adequate college preparation.) There have been over thirty years of serious linguistic research into ASL, and judging from the references, these jokers didn't do more than strip-mine it for a list of handshapes. AAARRRGGGHH!