A novel method of recognition of hand postures of Polish Sign Language (PSL) is presented in the paper. The method is based on a syntactic pattern recognition paradigm. A construction of algorithms for generating a structural (graph) description of hand postures that can be analyzed with the ETPL(k) graph grammar parsing model has been a main objective of the research. A structural description generated with these algorithms is unique and unambiguous that results in good discriminative properties of the method. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.