Mouthing refers to the movement of the mouth when articulating a word from the spoken language. This articulation is often not obligatory, but sometimes it is part of the phonology of the lexical entry. For instance, (a) illustrates the sign building, which can have the mouthings from Spanish /en ti 'ðad/ or /or γa ni θa 'θjon/. The aim of adding the mouthing is to differentiate the general meaning of the sign (‘building’) from specialized meanings (‘entity’ or ‘organization’). Also, the sign calculus, illustrated in (b), may appear with the mouthing /ad mi nis tra 'ti βo/ or /'al ʒe β̞ɾa/, which denotes ‘administrative’ and ‘algebra’ respectively. However, in non-specialized meanings mouthing may also be found in the general lexicon although it is not always compulsory.
a) building (‘building’)
(extracted from the corpus created in Villaécija, 2019)
b) calculus (‘calculus’)
(extracted from the corpus created in Villaécija, 2019)