摘要：The study presented in this article contributes to the analysis of movement in Finnish
Sign Language (FinSL) by investigating its complexity.1 In the study, manual and
nonmanual movements were treated as commensurable, and complexity was seen as a
property of a movement which correlates with the number of articulators and joints used
in its production. Using the lexical data provided by the Basic Dictionary of FinSL,
several types of movement varying in their degree of complexity were identified. The
main finding of the study was that the distribution of movements followed the linguistic
principle known as Zipf's Law derived from spoken language: the least complex
movements occurred most frequently, and an increase in complexity was associated
with a decrease in frequency. FinSL was thus shown to be similar to spoken languages
in its preference for simple forms. Hypotheses about the behaviour of movements, as
well as theoretical implications, are discussed.
