THE COLOUR SIGNALING PROCESS IN TURKISH SIGN LANGUAGE

This study deals with the analysis of the signs used to name colors in TurkishSign Language (TID). The aim of the study was to reveal how color signalingprocess works in TID and to describe the major linguistics characteristics in termsof arbitrariness, conventionality, iconicity. For the data of the study a corpus consisting of 16 colors was prepared and three hearing and speech impaired people,regardless of their age, education, socio-economic, and socio-cultural background,were randomly chosen to conduct the study. The subjects were asked through written Turkish to express those colors in TID. The analysis revealed that some colorsignaling in TID proved to be arbitrary and conventional and most of the signsseem to iconic