Where Should We Look for Language?

Summer 1986 WHERE SHOULD WE LOOK FOR LANGUAGE? William C. Stokoe We have been asking questions about language (and nonverbal communication) for so long, and satisfying answers seem still so far off, that we may have been looking in the wrong places. Like the man who lost his wallet in the middle of the block but searched under the corner street light because he could see better there, we may have let the wrong principles direct our searches. In The Sign and Its Masters Thomas A. Sebeok refers to Clever Hans, "the calculating horse of Mr. van Osten" frequently and finds the central lesson of that famous fraud and its exposure put most succinctly "by the leader of the Hans-Commission, Carl Stumpf, and his brilliant investigator Pfungst, when they spoke of 'looking for, in the horse, what should have been sought in the man'" (Sebeok 1979: 75). This lesson applies to a great many investigations, especially semiotic ones -into the nature of signifying and communicating; and linguistic ones -- into the nature of language itself. A founding principle, perhaps not often enough stated, of sign language studies (and of Sign Language Studies) is new perspective. Study of the language of deaf people helps to get around hypothetical constructions that block the view; it reveals too that many investigators of language have been looking in the 1986 by Linstok Press, Inc. See inside front cover. ISSN 0302-1475 171 SLS 51 Stokoe : 172 product for what they should have sought in its producers. Comparative philology and the neogrammarians contributed valuable knowledge about the family relationships of languages and about the regularity of sound change over time. Their attention to texts, however necessary in the case of languages with no living speakers, led these investigators away from available living speakers. This error was corrected when the new descriptive linguists began to leave texts on the library shelf and seek data from living, breathing informants. When these informants spoke languages very different from those of the much-studied Indo-European family, Boas, Sapir, Bloomfield, the Prague School, and others added new knowledge about phonetics and grammar, and also about the distinction between "correctness," a social judgment, and faithfulness to one's own dialect standards. But this emphasis on what people actually did when they talked -- and on the fine-grained phonetic analysis that had to precede conclusions about phonemics -- led investigators quite understandably to concentrate on speech, even to seek in speech what should have been sought in speakers. (Of course, all along, those who investigated speech, the organs producing it, the anatomy and function of the sense that heard it, and the areas of the brain involved with it were announcing new discoveries about how language worked, as they thought, when their valuable discoveries were in fact about speech.) The Chomskyan revolution in linguistics appeared to restore attention to speakers, as the transformational-generative grammarians sought that knowledge in native speakers which not only enabled them to create an infinity of correct sentences and none Summer 1986 SLS 51 Stokoe : 173 incorrect, but also enabled infants to acquire "the rules" of their language. Once again the effect of this new wave of investigation was an increment to knowledge, but it also diverted attention. In seeking to make linguistics a more exact science, to give it a rigorous methodology, Chomsky and his followers constructed so rational a theory that far more attention has been paid lately to well-made grammars than to the social creatures who, the theory supposes, possess "a language organ" as a common or "universal" human genetic given. In the usual scenario of this theory, a human infant hears those around it speaking -- in the simplest case, all of them speaking the same language. Listening, the infant does not imitate the others' utterances but is congenitally able to abstract from those utterances the rules that matter -- the rules that allow use of some sounds and not others, some combinations of sounds and not others; the rules that assign certain sound combinations to certain meanings; the rules for making syntactic structures; and other rules for transforming these into the patterns of actual utterances.... The list of rules can be and is...