**1. Introduction**

Studies on sign languages from all around the world have demonstrated that signed languages—just like spoken languages—vary from each other, and that, for the most part, the attested variation aligns well with typological patterns identified for spoken languages. A fairly recent addition to the typological study of signed languages are rural isolates, which typically arise in areas of the Global South with high incidences of hereditary deafness (Zeshan et al. 2013; de Vos and Pfau 2015). The expression of negation in signed languages has received considerable attention in recent years. In fact, standard negation is one of the domains of linguistic inquiry that gave the impetus to the field of sign language typology (Pfau 2016; Zeshan 2004). In the present study, we add to the picture data from Kata Kolok (KK), a rural, isolate sign language from Bali. Our goal is twofold: First, we aim to situate Kata Kolok typologically with respect to other sign languages, thus contributing to our understanding of variation in this grammatical domain. Second, the use of corpus data from different generations of Kata Kolok signers also allows us to address age-related variation that may be indicative of ongoing language change, in particular the emergence of non-manual negation strategies.

We start in Section 2 by providing some background on the emergence of structure in visual communication systems, addressing also documented instances of grammaticalization. In Section 3, we present a typological sketch of negation in spoken and signed languages, and in Section 4, we briefly introduce sociolinguistic characteristics of Kata

**Citation:** Lutzenberger, Hannah, Roland Pfau, and Connie de Vos. 2022. Emergence or Grammaticalization? The Case of Negation in Kata Kolok. *Languages* 7: 23. https://doi.org/10.3390/ languages7010023

Academic Editors: Wendy Sandler, Mark Aronoff and Carol Padden

Received: 17 September 2021 Accepted: 20 December 2021 Published: 28 January 2022

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Kolok and its users. The methodology of the present study is laid out in Section 5. Our findings are then presented in Section 6, separately for the specific manual and non-manual markers of negation that we identified. In the discussion in Section 7, we address synchronic and diachronic aspects pertinent to the study of Kata Kolok negation: First, we evaluate the theoretical and practical implications of the observed patterns from a typological perspective; second, we sketch potential pathways of diachronic language change. We close with some remarks on the limitations of the present study and suggestions for future research in Section 8.

#### **2. On the Emergence of Structure in Visual Communication Systems**
