ANÁLISE PRELIMINAR DE EXPRESSÕES NÃO-MANUAIS LEXICAIS NA LIBRAS

Brennan (1992) proposed the inclusion of the non-manual expressions, NMs, in the list of signed language phonological primes, for observing, in some signs of British Sign Language, their distinctiveness and obligatoriness. This research aimed to perform a preliminary analysis of Libras lexical NMs, still little explored (SOUZA, 2014). For this, 368 signs were collected from Xavier´s database (2006), created from Capovilla and Raphael’s (2001) dictionary. Although the results suggest that not all of the analyzed NMs are actually lexical, they point out some interesting features about them. In the investigated sample NMs produced by more than one articulator and without changes in their configuration during the realization of the sign outnumber. In addition, similar to other signed languages, cases in which NM are the only distinguishing feature are uncommon. However cases in which they are related to the meaning of the sign and in which they are articulated by lower parts of the face, as expected for lexical NMs, are more frequent.