Show of Hands: A Natural History of Sign Language

4. Signing and the Language Faculty

64 4 Signing and the Language Faculty A Modern Linguistics of Sign Language Douglas Baynton (2002) has pointed out that prior to the oralist victory over sign-based deaf education in the late nineteenth century, there was widespread acceptance, within the intellectual community, of sign languages as comprising a legitimate form of human language, accompanied by study of their properties. For example, the French scholar RochAmboise Bébian published serious linguistic studies of the French sign language in the mid-nineteenth century. Baynton describes the chilling effect that the oralist movement, supported by a social Darwinian view of sign languages as primitive , had on any further serious study of them. Such was the disdain that linguists had for sign languages that Edward Sapir could say this about them in his seminal 1921 book, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech: Still another interesting group of transfers are the different gesture languages, developed for the use of deaf-mutes, of Trappist monks vowed to perpetual silence, or of communicating parties that are within seeing distance of each other but are out of earshot. Some of these systems are one-to-one equivalences of the normal system of speech; others, like military gesture-symbolism or the gesture language of the Plains Indians of North America (understood by tribes of mutually unintelligible forms of speech) are imperfect transfers,limiting themselves to the rendering of such grosser speech elements Signing and the Language Faculty | 65 as are an imperative minimum under difficult circumstances. (p. 21) Modern scientific study of the signed languages of the deaf began with the work of William C. Stokoe at Gallaudet University (then College). Stokoe was a scholar of Middle English with a Ph.D. from Cornell University who was hired to teach at Gallaudet in the mid-1950s.When he arrived at Gallaudet he had no experience with deaf people or any form of signed language. He quickly became convinced that the conventional wisdom concerning “the sign language” among hearing people—that it was either elaborate pantomime or a crude surrogate for English—was inaccurate and insufficient. From the outset of his work to describe and analyze what came to be known as American Sign Language, Stokoe realized that it would shed light on the nature of language in general. Stokoe is often described as having “discovered”ASL or as having “proved” that ASL is a language.A good deal of mythology has sprung up around this question, and, to some extent,Stokoe felt about it the way Columbus should have felt when he was described as having “discovered” America. Just as American Indians had known about the Americas for more than 10,000 years before Columbus arrived, so deaf people had been aware of the “languageness” of their signing and of the benefits that it conferred long before Stokoe came on the scene.They were also “proving” that it was a real language on a daily basis by using it to perform all of the functions that languages usually perform. But just as Columbus had done with respect to the scope of the physical world, Stokoe’s accomplishment was to reveal these facts to a larger, skeptical public; and, in doing so, he made a “Columbian” addition to 66 | Signing and the Language Faculty our knowledge of the linguistic world and to our understanding of the human condition. One aspect of Stokoe’s genius was to recognize that it would not be good enough simply to announce the “good news” that sign language was really a language—he would need to show it using the tools of the science of language, the tools of descriptive linguistics. As we have seen, Noam Chomsky launched a revolution in linguistic science in the mid-1950s.As a result of this intellectual revolution, language, or the human capacity to produce and decode it, came to be seen more as the expression of a hard-wired language organ or “faculty” than as a social phenomenon. However, Stokoe was mainly influenced by an older anthropological linguistics that had as its most urgent goal describing exotic languages that were facing extinction.Anthropological linguists, and anthropologists in general for that matter, had for a half century been trying to overcome Western prejudices that depicted non-Western languages as inferior to those of Europe.These scholars had developed an armamentarium that could be used to describe any spoken language and transcribe it to paper...