Mouthing copies the articulation of a sign’s Turkish translation. In other words, during the manual production of a sign, the lips, and the tongue in some cases, silently perform the movements of a spoken word’s production [Lexicon - 2]. Though citation forms are almost always accompanied by mouthing, in natural signing, the mouthing component might be lost if the referent of a sign is well-established in discourse [Pragmatics - 2].
Mouthing can disambiguate signs that are homophones otherwise. For example, the sign munıcıpalıty and munıcıpalıty_bus have the same manual component, yet they are differentiated by mouthing. The former has belediye ‘municipality’ as mouthing, whereas the latter has otobüs ‘bus’.
/belediye/
munıcıpalıty
/otobüs/
/otobüs/
munıcıpalıty_bus
Mouthing can also disambiguate otherwise homophonous nouns and verbs such as ıron (noun) and to_ıron (verb). The mouthings for these signs are /ütü/ and /ütüleme/. Nouns display mouthing more frequently than verbs. See the examples below.
/ütü/
/ütü/
ıron
/ütüleme/
to_ıron