Sign Language Research is Alive and Well in Europe

Stokoe : 279 Review Article: SIGN LANGUAGE RESEARCH IS ALIVE AND WELL IN EUROPE William C. Stokoe The vigor and variety of recent sign language research in Europe is fully apparent in the proceedings recently published. 1 The Second European Congress an Sign Language Research, held in Amsterdam 14-18 July 1985, as set forth in Signs of Life, was excellently organized and conducted. The keynote addresses/papers in Signs of Life (hereafter SOL) contain evidence that their presenters, who led off the major sections, had studied the other contributions in advance. Brief questions and answers printed at the end of each section attest to the close and critical attention of participants. It is no reflection on the organizers or contributors but a comment on the state of the art of linguistics that the four sections -- linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and acquisition -do not permit a mutually exclusive division of the field. When linguists pursue what it is that makes human language human more assiduously than they examine the structure of individual languages, the boundary between linguistics and psycholinguistics disappears. In the other direction, the acquisition of language by infants and children might seem a major concern of psycholinguistics, but in the vast conceptual spaces created by the proliferation of linguistic sciences, sign psycholinguists now examine the mental processing behind the overt production of language: is language processing serial or parallel? Acquisition studies in sign research, however, are empirical studies of children -- children deaf and hearing amid caretakers hearing and deaf using systems natural and contrived. Sociolinguistics is also a protean body of questions, methods, and knowledge. Despite the psycholinguisticization of linguistics, there are still those who refuse to look at language behavior apart from its social and cultural context, who feel that human interaction is at least as important as the posited innate language capacity or the human language "organ." 1. Tervoort, B. (ed.) 1986. Signs of Life: Proceedings of the second European Congress on Sign Language Research. Amsterdam: Institute of General Linguistics of the University of Amsterdam. Publ. No. S. 15 x 21cm. xii & 2 3 3 pp. Illus. Bbg. ISBN 90-71700-01-1. $24.50 (+ $8 For airmail). ( 1986 by Linstok Press, Inc. See inside front cover. ISSN 0302-1475 SLS 52 Fall 1986 Stokoe : 280 These considerations of the inchoate state of language study notwithstanding, the organization of the Congress and structure of the book make the reviewer's task easier. I will devote some time to the four keynote papers (by Brennan, Boyes-Braem, Kyle, and Volterra), taking up other papers in the sections briefly or more at length as seems to me appropriate. Linguistics. Mary Brennan of Edinburgh with the most general of the topics, linguistics, addresses two issues: simultaneity versus sequentiality, and the dilemma of the sign linguist. Both are topical, and not surprisingly the former was taken up again by Penny Boyes-Braem in the psycholinguistics keynote, and the latter by Jim Kyle in the sociolinguistics keynote. Brennan makes a strong case for simultaneity -- i.e. for parallel processing -- in the Face of numerous recent exercises in finding segments, sequences, syllables, and sequentiality in individual signs. She does so with data from the Edinburgh study of British SL, focusing particularly on compounds in which both morphemes are simultaneously presented to an addressee or observer. I wish to inject a personal note here, if only to reassure current researchers. Brennan and others treating this issue refer to or quote from my first study of ASL: ". .. the sign morpheme...is... simultaneously not sequentially produced" (1960:39f) and to the "Stokoe notation" (SOL:passim), which was presented as an arbitrary left-to-right arrangement of tab (location), dez (hendshape(s), and sig (action) with provision in the sig symbols for vertical (simul.) or horizontal (seq.) placement on the page. -- but was explicitly chosen to represent the relatively simultaneous aspects of a sign. Several authors in SOL seem somewhat uneasy in considering recent research that renders "Stokoe notation" obsolete. They should realize that in science the age of an idea is no grounds for veneration; the notation was conceived and presented as a first and tentative step and it was my expectation from the outset that further research -- for which...