Modality and Structure in Signed and Spoken Languages (review)

Legitimacy is most readily understood in terms of group membership, and the simplest social groups are rooted in similarity. The easiest way to achieve legitimacy is thus to show that one is similar enough to the core members of a group to deserve membership in that group. It is therefore not surprising that the first research on signed languages was devoted to legitimation. William Stokoe (1960) changed the world in a real way more than any other modern linguist through his demonstration that American Sign Language (ASL) could be studied like any other natural language and hence deserved to be treated on the same level as any spoken language. Klima and Bellugi (1979) showed that deep analysis of a signed language could yield results of broad theoretical interest to all linguists. Most of the research that has followed these pioneering works is similarly devoted to showing how similar signed languages are to spoken languages.

Only recently has the social legitimacy of signed languages been secure enough that at least some sign language researchers have begun to realize that the greater value of signed language as a research model may lie not in similarity but rather in difference. In particular, by comparing signed and spoken languages, we can identify the properties that are pertinent to language per se and distinguish them from those that are accidental. By studying the differences, we might begin to explain some of the structural properties of the two types of languages, since these differences may be due to constraints on each of the modalities, that is to say, we might get a partial answer to the question ‘why languages are the way they are’ (5).

The book under review reveals through its title that it is part of this new wave. Its goal is to answer the following question about the nature of human language: ‘What are the effects and non-effects of modality upon linguistic structure?’ (1). It purports to achieve that goal by examining and comparing a variety of grammatical structures in languages in both modalities. The opening chapter by one of the editors (Richard P. Meier) lays out very clearly both the similarities (non-effects) and differences (effects) between languages of the two modalities and presents the potential significance of such similarities and differences for our knowledge and understanding of human language. The chapter is written in a way that provides an entry point for a more general audience to some basic issues in sign language linguistics and shows why this area of linguistic investigation should be of general interest to linguists.

The first section of the book is devoted to phonology and so raises the issue of the impact of modality on language structure in a direct way. Since phonology is the linguistic level that interfaces with our articulatory and perceptual systems, languages in different physical modalities should have different phonological properties, because the articulators (vocal tract vs. hands and body) and the perception system (ears vs. eyes) are so different. The question is whether such physiological differences penetrate the linguistic organization of the phonological units and whether modality leaves its footprints on the phonological structure of the two types of languages. This section indicates that this is indeed so. Signed language and spoken language phonologies differ in significant respects that are traceable to differences between the two modalities, in particular to the simultaneous vs. sequential nature of the signs. This point is not new. It goes back to the pioneering work of Stokoe (1960), who showed that signs have a sublexical level of organization comparable to the phonological structure of spoken languages but that the basic units in signs are combined simultaneously rather than sequentially. The contribution of this section lies in the variety of perspectives it offers on the issue—theoretical, psychological, and statistical—and the uniformity of their conclusion...