Jonathan G. Pearl
Rice University
Fall Semester1994r
Is Sign a Language?
Introduction
If a tree falls in the woods, and there is noone by to hear it, acoustics tells us, there would still be a sound. If a mind thinks, and there are no words, no language, to express this thought, does the thought exist, can it exist? Language is the independent verification of thought. Without the ability to transfer our thoughts to others, we are no longer distinctly human. For what else, besides the ability to communicate our thoughts, distinguishes Humanity from the rest of the Animal Kingdom? But what is it about our thoughts and communication that takes us outside the experience of other animals?
Baby birds are known to chirp or gawk, mouths agape, as a signal, for feeding, to their parents. This is a clear form of communication. There is cause and effect. The chirping carries meaning: a need or request for food. The parents respond by providing the food. In fact, as Tinbergen notes, the signal is necessary for the feeding even to take place. (1) The parents' response indicates that the communication is successful.
Human infants communicate with adults, in rudimentary ways, through emotive cries and giggles. They cry when they lack something they desire, and giggle when they are pleased. (2) Tinbergen compares animal communication to such emotional language in humans; and describes such signalling behaviour as an "immediate reaction to internal and external stimuli." (3) To further distinguish these signalling behaviours from language he notes that such behaviours are innate, that animals, raised in isolation from others of their species, still exhibit many of these signalling, and the corresponding reacting, behaviours -- such as those used for fighting or mating -- without ever having observed them. (4)
Likewise, a human infant need not have heard another cry in order to cry oneself. It is an innate ability of human babies to cry, and this crying signals meaning to adults. But meaning-bearing signals of the sort used by animals and infants are not what we call language. In fact, the wordinfant itself derives from the Latin privative in- and the present participle of the verb to speak: literally, not speaking. (5) Tinbergen's argument seems to center on the assumption that innate behaviours are animalistic, and that human language is a step beyond such behaviours, because it is not innate. Unfortunately, this argument does not hold up. In fact, it is the prime motive of many researchers today, in the forefront of psycholinguistics and neuroscience, to prove that the opposite is true: that language is deeply rooted in the instincts of human nature.
It had long been thought that without speech, there is not language, and that language enables thought, which is what makes us human. (6) Recent studies indicate that an infant's brain is not without comprehension (although lacking language), but that it is distinguish variety in its environment. (7) It is therefore theorized, on the basis of such data (and the amazing speed at which the human mind is capable of integrating the complex system which every language represents), that the infant brain is predisposed to acquire language of some sort, from its first hours. In a sense, that thought precedes the means to express. (8) If such an instinctive yearning is part of every human being, it stands to reason that a body deprived of the input of auditory information would strive to replace this avenue of communication with another mode.
Whether a soundless language is possible, is the subject of this paper. Our first task will be to investigate just what it is about human speech that we deem it language, qualitatively different from the rudimentary communication systems mentioned above. Next we will analyze Sign, and compare the elements we find to those of Speech, which we will have determined as being necessary for language to exist. Finally, we will posit a definition of Language that satisfies our stated inquiry: whether Sign is a form of language, or rather an alternate mode of communication, qualitatively different from language.
Speech as Language
For communication to be deemed Language it must be capable of an infinite variety of contexts, meanings, and intentions. Bees can convey, through elaborate dances, the location of food. However their system of communication allows only for this one subject. A spider may go through an intricate series of gestures, to signal that it is in fact a male spider seeking a mate. But it will never vary these gestures for its own creative purposes. (9) These are indeed efficient means of communication for bees and spiders, but do not constitute Language. What features, then are necessary to render a system of communication into language? Bolinger and Sears expressed the question in the following way:
What conditions need to be met for the signs of language, limited in number, to designate reality, which is infinite? The first condition is that reality must be segmented...[Secondly,] segments must be repeatable and...we must have some mechanism to recognize similarity between one appearance and the next...The third condition is built-in vagueness; absolute identity of segments cannot be required, for dealing with the continuum of experience would then be impossible. (10)
Reality, independent of Humanity, may be considered an undifferentiated continuum, where the beginnings and endings of things, in time and space for instance, are indistinct. However, in order for our minds to make sense of such a reality -- and thus to facilitate our communication, and our ability to compare and contrast our own ideas and perceptions with those of others -- it is necessary that we perceive discontinuities in this continuum. We call this procedure the segmentation of reality. In finding dissimilarity, we create a world of discrete objects, and are thus able to name them. (11)
This naming is of such significance for human society that it is a foundational part of many of the world's religions:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God; and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. (12)
In order to comprehend reality we must segment it. In order to communicate our thoughts, we must name these segments. Linguistically, naming takes the form of discrete meaning-bearing units, such as words, which designate the discrete particles of this perceived reality. In naming, we create conventional representations which can be used and reused to convey meaning to other human beings. Conventional, because though our thoughts may be independent of words, the words enable us to share, and build on the thoughts of others. As Oliver Sacks put it: "If thought transcends language, and all representational forms, nonetheless it creates these, and needs these, for its advancement." (13)
Elements of Speech
Speech is made up of discrete meaning-bearing units of sounds. These units make up the lexicon of a language. The most recognizable of these units are words. Words combine to form propositions, which are relations between the meanings of words. Formally, words can be divided intomorphemes, which are the elemental units of meaning. These morphemes are of two types: bound and free. Morphemes combine in rule-driven ways to form words. Free morphemes are independent units, such as pig and talk. In English, the bound morphemes -s and -ed, for instance, may be attached to other morphemes in specific ways (i.e. pig --> pigs, talk --> talked), in order to indicate "more than one" and "in the past" respectively. These combinations, called inflections, are numerous, and vary greatly in form and method from language to language.
Morphemes in turn are made up of one or more smaller units, called phonemes. Phonemes are units of sounds, selected from the set of all the sounds which the human vocal apparatus is capable of producing. Each spoken language uses its own set; and none uses the entire set of sounds available. Phonemes are classified according to distinct features, such as the position of the tongue, or whether the vocal folds are engaged (voicing) during articulation, etc. The relation between these sound units and their meanings is primarily an arbitrary one. Their value is in being recognizable and repeatable. The sounds must be both produceable, using the average human vocal apparatus, and perceptible, to the average human ear.
Any given language may recognize different features in discriminating the phonemes native to its system. Hence phonemes are ranges rather than exact definitions. Variations, as perceived in individual instances, are known as allophones. Such variations in the production of morphemes are termed allomorphs. The level of phonemes is the most arbitrary level of language, as there is virtually no correlation between the individual sounds and the meanings that they can be used to convey (14).
In addition, language consists of a set of rules for combining these discrete units, which enables us to express differing relationships between the elements of our conversation, the propositions. Language is therefore not simply the words in our lexicon, and their constituent parts, but also the system of combining them, which allows us to distinguish subject from object, actor from activity, etc. As Steven Pinker puts it, it is "the ability to convey that man bites dog." (15) Or as one introductory linguistics textbook summarizes:
A language, then, consists of all the sounds, words, and possible sentences. When you know a language, you know the sounds, the words, and the rules for their combination. (16)
Aspects of Sign
What then do we make of Sign? It has been noted that: "History records not a single instance of a community of hearing people who had a sign language rather than a spoken language as their primary, native language: speech is clearly the preferred system (17)." However among the congenitally deaf, and those who have lost their hearing before the acquisition of speech, there is no choice in the matter. This preferred system is beyond their reach. Without the means to easily perceive the spoken word, they must acquire another means to language, or remain unable to communicate effectively with other human beings. Is this silent mode of communication indeed a language, or is it something entirely different?
In considering this issue, let us first examine Bolinger and Sears' necessary conditions for language to represent reality. First, reality must be segmented. In language, this segmentation takes the form of a vocabulary, meaningful units used to represent perceived distinctions in reality. American Sign Language (18) clearly fulfills this requirement. The Dictionary of American Sign Language indicates an extensive vocabulary of signs in the thousands. Although a dictionary of only a few thousand English words might not be impressive, there are two factors to bear in mind. First, this is considered by many knowledgeable of ASL to be only a small portion of the signs commonly in use. Secondly, the lexicon of ASL, although small in relation to English, makes up for much of this limitation through elaborate inflections on words, especially its verbs, as we shall see.
Next, these segments must be repeatable and recognizable. If the system of representation were too complex, or utilized a mode in which we have only limited facility, we might have no means of recognizing the repetition of these units. For instance, if segments were designated by impulses of heat of varying intensities, we might be able to perceive their existence, but would be unlikely either to repeat them ourselves, or recognize the recurrence of such symbols: we lack an apparatus for generating controlled bursts of heat, or one for precisely measuring these, in perception.
But ASL uses the hands and face, not impulses of heat. It is common for users of spoken languages to use an extensive repertoire of facial expressions in conversation to convey subtle emotional context, or even to contradict the meaning of their words alone. And, more importantly for Sign, the hands of Homo Sapiens are highly articulate and are capable of subtle variations and gradations of shape and movement (19). As well, the human visual apparatus is quite capable of perceiving highly specialized information. We have both the ability to repeat manual-gestural symbols, and the mechanism to perceive such repetitions.
Third, there must be an endemic vagueness to these symbols. That is, they can not be exact replicas of what they represent, nor can they be so strictly governed that their precision distinguishes them, not only from other symbols, but also from other would be recurrences of the same symbol. Sign Language consists largely of specific hand-shapes, following specific movement patterns, in designated locations of space about the body of the signer. Although there is a greater degree of iconicity perceivable in Sign Language than in Speech (20), this iconic quality is not a necessary feature for the conveyance of meaning in Sign Language. In fact, there is evidence that the iconic features of many signs become suppressed over time. (21) For most signs, even with iconic roots, the choice of hand shape or movement is arbitrary, or at best only vaguely related to what is represented (22). This embedding of iconicity ensures that the signs maintain enough distance from their significators to fulfill this final condition. So, Sign represents reality; but is it therefore a language?
Pidgins and Creoles
The lexicon is a primary feature of any language. As noted above, words are the most recognizable elements of speech, and are the units which make up the lexicon. In Sign, manual-gestural signs comprise the lexicon. Of course, a lexicon alone does not encompass language. As we have noted, a language requires not only a lexicon, but rules for combining these units: a grammar. In many Speech communities there have arisen, on occasion, lexicons without such a grammar. However, one is hard-pressed to call such systems language.
Under conditions of forced labor and chattel slavery, diverse populations have, throughout history, been brought together with little, if any, shared language. Without an efficient means to communicate, these workers have adopted makeshift lexicons, largely derived from the language of the colonial powers, as well as tidbits from their own various language backgrounds, as their only common linguistic ground. With great variation in the grammars of their languages of origin, few conventions of syntax and inflection could take hold. What occurred more likely was the dropping of many such structures from usage, and an arbitrariness of use for those that did remain. It is as if the speakers of Pidgins were using a shared vocabulary, but nonetheless speaking their own languages.
The children of these workers, then, grew up hearing a Pidgin as their first language (or if not their first, at least their only means to communicate with their agemates and and others outside of the home). Not limited by ingrained expectations of their own language, and yearning for efficient means of communication, these children wound up perceiving or creating structure, where there was none. The resultant languages have come to be called creoles. Such Creoles, though arising independent of one another, typically share many conventional rules of grammar. So many, in fact, that at least one researcher, comparing them to the typically consistent "mistakes" that children make in learning their first language, considers them to comprise a primitive grammar, innate to the human brain. (23)
Bickerton describes the children in such Pidgin-speaking communities as having a different sort of language-learning task than the typical child is faced with. He explains that most children acquire their first language being surrounded by linguistically competent adults, who provide them with accurate models to follow. (24) This same observation might as easily be made for the typical deaf child, unable to understand the language of one's hearing and speaking parents. Although their linguistic model may be accurate, to the child unable to hear it, it remains incomprehensible.
Is Sign Language, then, a sort of Creole? Is there a corresponding Pidgin, which preceded today's sign languages? Or is Sign itself yet a Pidgin of sorts, an amalgam of uninflected, syntax-free symbols?
The Vocabulary of ASL
Early assumptions (many of which were widely held as recently as a generation ago in the United States) maintained that ASL was such a Pidgin-like system. It had been remarked that signs lacked subtlety and inflection, that ASL consisted of "a loose collection of otherwise linguistically unrelated forms -- that, for instance, sign operates with 'indistinct parts of speech.'" (25) More recently, it has been argued to the contrary, that ASL signs, like spoken words, are inflected and altered in consistent ways, and observe strict syntactic relations.
But where do the signs of ASL come from? Interestingly, for American Sign Language, we have a very good idea of where much of the lexicon began. Ray Jackendoff presents a brief history of the origins of ASL thus:
In 1817 the first American school for the deaf was opened in Hartford, Connecticut. Its language of instruction was French Sign Language, introduced by Laurent Clerc, a deaf graduate of L'Epée's school. This school was quickly followed by other residential schools throughout the country, and 1864 saw the founding of the National Deaf Mute College, now Gallaudet University. In these schools, students speaking a variety of sign languages (including Martha's Vineyard Sign) were brought together, and elements of their language blended with French Sign Language to form ASL. (26)
Only about ten percent of deaf children in the U.S. are born to deaf parents. This figure is even lower in many other countries, where hereditary deafness is rare. Historically, because of this, most deaf children do not acquire their first language in the normal way from their parents (27). For most deaf individuals, their first manual-gestural signs were personal symbols, often called home sign, used to communicate with their family. These symbols, though often mimetic, were not conventional. They would likely differ, even grossly, from subject to subject or family to family. Most often, their first exposure to conventional signs were at such residential schools as those mentioned above.
As these individuals were brought together, what resulted was an amalgam of their respective home signs, with the existing vocabulary of French Sign Language. Even today, many individuals bring personal or regional signs to such Sign communities. On the surface, this seems parallel to the creation of Pidgins among populations of speakers of various languages. In the case of ASL, French Sign Language could be seen as the dominant language, from which the majority of "words" were taken, and the home signs as the personal lexical belongings of the individual signers. The question is, however, does the expressiveness of ASL end there? Is it simply, like Pidgins, an unstructured (or loosely structured) and highly variable stringing together of symbols?
Elements of Sign
To answer this question, it is necessary for us to compare the elements of Sign with the particles we have established for Speech. As noted above, manual-gestural signs constitute the lexicon of Sign Languages, just as words comprise the lexicon of spoken languages. Are these two units analogous? Let us review the make-up of Speech, and see if the analogy holds.
As noted, a word consists of morphemes, the smallest meaningful units, which in turn are comprised of phonemes, bundles of auditorily perceivable features. Sign, as a silent system of communication, necessarily uses a different system of organization than sound. It is a visual system made up of hand-shapes, their movements and transformations in space, and spatial location relative to parts of the body of the signer. If signs are the words of Sign language, they ought then to submit to analysis for morphemic constituents? It appears that they do.
Sign Morphemes
For instance, in English it is common to create nouns from verbs, by adding the morphemic suffix -er, connoting "one who Xes," where X represents a verb (i.e. singer -- one who sings; player -- one who plays, etc.). In ASL, this same function is served by the sign for PERSON, INDIVIDUAL (28) (namely [] BB _, in Stokoe's system of transcription (29), describing the space in front of the signer's body from shoulders to hips, both hands in the flat "B" handshape, moving together in a downward motion). When this sign immediately precedes a verb it carries the same meaning as the suffix -er in English usage.
Another example of bound morphemes in ASL is the pair of motions, toward and away from the signer, as used in verbs, such as GIVE/GET, BORROW/LEND, COME/GO, ACCEPT/REFUSE, etc. These verb pairs may be represented by the same signs with a change only in the motion of the hands, to distinguish the metaphorical activity toward or away from the subject of the sentence. Stokoe represents these motive elements as _ and ^, for motion toward and away from, respectively. There is no direct equivalent to this sort of bound morpheme in English. As seen from the glosses above, English often uses entirely different words to denote such a change in meaning.
Just as the basic free morphemes of English are often uninflected words in themselves, so too there are simple uninflected signs in ASL, often studied in citation-form (30) or known by their English gloss transcriptions (i.e. GIVE, LOOK-AT, etc.), which serve the same role. The common practice of transcribing signs into glosses, despite its abundant usefulness for researchers, has been cited as an unexpected source of confusion when comparing Sign to Speech. (31) Nonetheless, it allows us to examine simple, uninflected signs in a written form. These glosses can be combined with more elaborate descriptions of articulation to provide a better understanding of how they actually apply in conversation.
ASL, unlike English, is a highly inflected language. As mentioned above, this aspect of sign helps to make up for its limited lexicon. One of the confusions which arose out of the use of glosses, cited by Klima and Bellugi, was in translations back and forth between Spoken English and ASL. Using bilingual native signers (i.e. hearing children of deaf parents), they studied the expressiveness of Sign as compared to English. Subjects were asked to relate a narrative. Next they were asked to sign the same narrative. The resulting presentations were then compared. What they found at first surprised them. It appeared as if the signed versions left out much of the details.
For instance, the glosses for the signed versions of the English sentences "And they started laughing and laughing," and "This made me burst out crying," appeared as START LAUGH and MAKE (ME) CRY (32). What they discovered, upon closer examination, was that the movements of the ASL signs underwent inflectional variations that, in retranslation into English by other subjects, seemed to bear equivalent meaning to the additional words of the English originals.
These procedures of inflection were described in the following way: "LAUGH was made repeatedly with slow movement, intertranslatable with the English laughed and laughed; CRY, which is ordinarily repeated in root form, was made only once and with an intensified movement, which led signers to translate it as burst out crying." (33) Many such alterations of the basic movements of signs are typically used in consistent manners to inflect for aspect in verbs. Circular and elliptical motions, repetitions or lack thereof, use of both hands (for usually one-handed signs), increases in the speed of articulation, or changes from lax to tense articulations are some of the alterations which mark for duration and types of action (i.e. continuative, incessant, frequentative), intensity, completion or incompletion, singular versus plural or dual subjects, etc. (34)
Clearly, such motive inflections as we have described serve to modify root-signs in ways analogous to the morphemic inflections carried out by prefixes, suffixes, and also by added words in English. Research is ongoing to determine the extent to which such comparisons remain valid. However, it is clear that, to some degree, these comparisons can be made. That is, that there is a corresponding morphemic level of signs.
Phonemes and Cheremes
The next task, in comparing Sign to Speech is to analyze these morphemes for further subdivisions: a phonemic level. Stokoe coined the wordchereme (35)
to describe this level in sign language. Just as phonemes can be described by way of distinctive auditory features, so too can cheremes be described by way of distinctive articulatory features. Whereas sounds can be described by tongue position, voicing of the vocal folds, etc., signs can be described by hand-shapes, locations about the body of the signer, and motions.
Similarly, as languages select a finite number of phonemes to constitute its menu of sounds, so too sign languages select a finite number of hand-shapes, locations, and movements, which vary from one sign language to another. Parallels exist as well to the limitations one finds on the combinations of phonemes. Just as English limits the consonant phonemes, for instance, that can follow s in initial position, ASL limits the hand-shapes that can be used simultaneously in two-handed signs. (36)
It is clear from this analysis that sign language contains a lexicon of signs, made up of morphemic units, which further subdivide into phonemes (or cheremes), analogous to what is found in spoken languages. Additionally, we find that there are regular rules for the combining of these particles, defining both legal and illegal constructions. That is, as English speakers can determine that squord, though not an English word, is possible, but strlpreet is not, equivalents can be found for any given sign language. (37)
In short, all the elementary particles of language exist in ASL, and by extension are possible in any sign language. But all this is true of pidgins as well, which, though derived from existing languages, are not quite language themselves. They lack what Jackendoff likes to call theexpressive variety of language (38): its accessibility to form an unlimited set of propositions. What remains is to examine whether such a grammar exists in ASL, which might raise it above the status of Pidgin languages.
The Grammar of ASL
As we have seen, ASL makes use of extensive inflections on verbs. Although this technique may seem exotic or unfamiliar to English speakers, it has been compared to similar methods (albeit in the auditory, not visual, mode) of other spoken languages, such as Hungarian and Onandaga. (39) As well, we have presented evidence that there are consistent means of noun-forming verbs, using the prefix-like [] BB Ú construction. Though it had been argued that ASL operates with indistinct parts of speech, we clearly see that this is not the case. That, in fact, there are distinctions between noun and verb, for instance. Many other functions, served in English by adjectival or adverbial modifiers, are included in the inflective modification on the motions of verb signs.
It has been observed that ASL lacks tense markings. As this is of constant importance to English and many other Indo-European languages, it has been seen as an apparent limitation of sign. However, ASL does mark for temporal location, normally at the beginning of a conversation, this serving the role of tense marker, until otherwise indicated. (40) This has been compared to similar rules in spoken Malay. (41) Such contextual understanding of time, lacking tense inflections, is not entirely absent in English or French, however. For instance, it is common for near future events, or for habitual events, which may be future or past, to be denoted in the present tense as: I'm going home tomorrow or Les vendredis, il pleut toujours.
ASL has also been found to utilize auxiliary verbs in ways similar to English (and most similar to creole languages). These auxiliaries include signs roughly the equivalent of will, must/may, should, let, etc. As well, there is use of FINISH (or its negative form meaning NOT-YET) to mark for completion, as in the English use of have, has or had. (42)
Word-order, though variable between different languages, is relatively consistent within a language, and helps to classify its syntax. English for instance is referred to as an SVO language, meaning that its standard form of statement is a subject followed by a verb followed by an object. Japanese, on the other hand is known as an SOV language, where the verb usually takes the final position. Some researchers have argued that ASL is primarily, like English an SVO language. However, sign language, being in the visual mode, and using several independent articulators (namely, the two hands and the face, and even at times the position of the entire body) is subject to a different set of liberties and limitations from any spoken language.
What has developed as a result, is what has been described as the structured use of space. (43) This facilitates certain simultaneous articulations, unavailable in speech. For instance, there is flexibility in the order of signs in sentences, such as Mike looks at me. This is because the ASL verb LOOK-AT can be articulated with the hand facing toward the signer, which marks the first-person as the object of the sentence. In addition, Sign exploits such possibilities with virtually unlimited locational pronomic referents. That is, a sign for an individual or an object can beplaced in a particular spot in the signing space (the area in front of the signer's body, which is used for articulations of signs). In this way, a mere point to that spot, or modification of the facing of the hand in the signing of verbs, similar to that indicated for LOOK-AT, will suffice to indicate actors and patients in ensuing discourse.
For this reason as well, as we noted above, glosses often seem to indicate an impoverished language, when in fact it is the system of writing that lacks the expressiveness inherent in the signs. Similar complaints have been made about creole languages. (44) And similarly, they often lack an expressive writing system. For creoles, some have attributed this to the extensive use of intonation as a marker of meaning, which are absent in written transcriptions. An inkling of this sort of inflection can be seen in question intonation (namely a raising of pitch at the end ) in syntactically unaltered English statements, such as Mary's going home? In addition to intonation, aspects of body position and facial gestures often note changes of meaning. Sometimes these intonational or other markings may even negate the entirety of a statement, as in English the statement Oh, I believe that can be presented in a manner that unequivocally indicates disbelief.
It is just that Sign Language uses many of these gestural inflections (although, obviously not vocal intonation) in more systematic ways. Some hearing observers have been known to notice that signers often appear to be grimacing. As a result of their systematic use, some facial expressions in Sign take on meanings unaccustomed in spoken languages. For instance, a tilting back of the head, with the mouth slightly open, and the eyebrows raised, has been noted as a marker for dependent or relative clauses. (45) Such grammatical markings in sign are little understood. Research continues in this area; and it is likely that the next decade may reveal much more about the grammars of sign languages.
sign as language
From what we have discovered above, it seems paramount that sign languages be included in the family of human languages. Their apparent expressive extent is unlimited. In fact, as we have seen, there are certain types of expressions available to signers which are far more indirect in spoken languages. To be fair, there are also clear limitations to the expressiveness of Sign, but limitations which fall within the scope of those found for other spoken languages as well. What has been discovered in the past few decades, is that sign languages are more than lexical strings, that their lexicon consists of determinable sublexical units, which are generated and combine in systematic ways which can only be described as linguistic. To be sure, most sign languages in use today, are relatively young systems, and like their cousins in spoken language, creoles, they will likely develop and grow to greater complexity and our understanding of this complexity will increase as well.
It is necessary therefore to posit a new definition of Language, that accepts the possibility of changes in modality, as seen in the shift from vocal-auditory to manuogestural-visual in sign languages:
Language is that means of communication unique to the human species, which facilitates the expression of internal thoughts. It is the independent verification of thoughts, between human subjects.
Language consists of a lexicon of symbols, which are conventional among a community of people who share the same language, but may vary in arbitrary ways from those of other languages. These symbols are further divisible into sublexical particles, known as morphemes, which are the smallest units of meaning, and combine in rule-driven ways to form symbols representing more compound ideas, such as plurality along with the naming of objects, tense aspect and modality along with verbs, etc. These morphemes are made up of still smaller units of arbitrary symbols, called phonemes, that can be distinguished one from another by means of definable (though flexible) features of articulation. These features define the range of acceptable (hence recognizable) variants from the ideal, for each phoneme.
Each language contains a grammar of rules, which structure the relations between lexical units in systematic ways, giving standard patterns of form for the expression of basic patterns of meaning. These rules may be bent only for expressive force. Though thus somewhat variable, these standards must be consistent enough to provide mutual intelligibility to users of the same language.
Finally, these individual languages are necessarily tied to the universals of human experience, and thus the expressions of any one language are necessarily intertranslatable with those of all others.
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1. 1. Tinbergen 1975, p. 74.
2. 2. At least those are how tradition leads us to interpret such signals. We do not have infants, who are also fluent in language, to translate for us. Nor are we capable of remembering such early days, that we might later articulate our intentions. Without such means, there is no verification of such thoughts.
3. 3. Tinbergen 1975, p. 74.
4. 4. Ibid., pp. 74-78.
5. 5. e.g., Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, Second Edition, Simon & Schuster, 1983, p. 937.
6. 6. Wheeler 1994, quoting Ted Supalla.
7. 7. Fromkin and Rodman 1988, p.369.
8. 8. e.g. Pinker 1994, p. 125.
9. 9. Fromkin and Rodman 1988, pp. 21-22.
10. 10. Bolinger and Sears 1981, p. 110.
11. 11. cf. "It is certain that we are not given reality, but have to construct it for ourselves, in our own way...," Sacks 1990, p. 74, footnote 75.
12. 12. The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version, John 1.1-1.3
13. 13. Sacks 1990, p. 42, footnote 47.
14. 14. What some might consider an exception to this arbitrariness is the fact that tensed, closed vowels are often associated with smallness, and lax, open vowels with largeness, as in teeny-weeny and humongous. There seems to be some remnants of iconicity in the relation between the shape of the mouth producing these sounds, and the meaning of such words. However, this can not be elaborated across an entire vocabulary: for instance, "heat" does in no way connote something smaller than "hot," nor is a "boat" larger than a "steamer." This iconicity is an exception, rather than the rule.
15. 15. Pinker 1994, p. 83.
16. 16. Fromkin and Rodman, p. 11.
17. 17. Klima and Bellugi 1979, p. 1.
18. 18. American Sign Language (ASL) is our primary model throughout. The assumption is made that what is typical of this sign language is possible in any sign language, and therefore may be used as representative of these others, though there may be significant differences between ASL and other Sign Language systems.
19. 19. Klima and Bellugi 1979, p. 43.
20. 20. e.g. Klima and Bellugi 1979, p. 3.
21. 21. Klima and Bellugi 1979, p. 28.
22. 22. Of course, a hand can not be a chair, or a circle, or a person. As much as the symbols chosen appear to be iconic to hearing observers, or more so than English words, for instance, the fact that they are symbols is, in itself significant, and representative of a certain degree of arbitrariness. Perhaps our hearing expectations belie this. But it is akin to the fact that as adults it is difficult for us to appreciate the level of complexity in processing which an infant must attain in order to acquire even a spoken language. It must not only distinguish the specific sounds which are made and relate them to the objects which they represent, but more significantly, it must be able to even focus in on the sounds as having significance in the first place. It must pick this aspect out of the mass of data which its senses are accumulating. It is the same for a deaf child, except that the data picked out happens to be in the visual mode, rather than the auditory.
23. 23. Bickerton 1983.
24. 24. Bickerton 1983, p. 118.
25. 25. Klima and Bellugi 1979, p. 30.
26. 26. Jackendoff 1993, p. 85.
27. 27. Klima and Bellugi 1979, p. 2.
28. 28. These examples are largely taken from Stokoe, et al. 1976, Appendix A, "American Sign Language Syntax."
29. 29. One aspect of sign language that makes it especially difficulty to study for English speaking individuals, for instance, is its lack of a standard writing system. Although such systems have been proposed by Stokoe among others, they have more often than not been transcription systems, akin to a phonetic alphabet, useful to scientists, but of little value to the layperson. Perhaps largely for this reason, and perhaps even resistance in the Deaf Community to submit to what they might consider the standards of a speaking world, such systems have not taken hold. Habit often leads the hearing among us to think of grammatical structure, and words themselves, in terms of the written forms which we use. In fact, for English, and many of the other widespread languages of the world, it is the written word which serves as the standard, where pronunciations can vary so greatly that speech is rendered mutually unintelligible between English speakers of far-remote origins. In Chinese, this element has gone to the furthest extreme, that the written symbols are the only commonality among the diverse dialects spoken, whose spoken words bear little, if any, resemblance to those of other so-called dialects.
30. 30. These citation-form signs are the rough equivalent of slowly and precisely articulated words, such as parents use to teach their toddlers new words: "Look Tommy, an E-LE-FANT. Can you say elephant?"
31. 31. Klima and Bellugi 1979, p. 189.
32. 32. Klima and Bellugi 1979, p. 189.
33. 33. Klima and Bellugi 1979, p. 190.
34. 34. Klima and Bellugi 1979, Chapter 11, throughout; also Wilbur 1978, pp. 93-98.
35. 35. Stokoe, et al 1976, p. xxix:
"Analogous with the phoneme is the sign language chereme (CARE-eem, the first syllable from a Homeric Greek word meaning 'handy')."
36. 36. Klima and Bellugi 1979, e.g. pp. 63-65.
37. 37. Klima and Bellugi 1979,pp. 63-65.
38. 38. Jackendoff 1993.
39. 39. Jackendoff 1993, p. 94.
40. 40. Stokoe, et al. 1976, p. 282.
41. 41. Wilbur 1978, p. 95.
42. 42. Stokoe, et al. 1976, Appendix A.
43. 43. Klima and Bellugi 1979, Chapter 12, throughout.
44. 44. Fischer 1978.
45. 45. Tweney, Liddell and Bellugi 1983.