Perspectives on Perspectives

JG rev. 365 PERSPECTIVES ON PERSPECTIVES [A Review of Language in Sign: An International Perspective on Sign Language. J. Kyle & B. Woll eds. London: Croom Helm. 1983. Paper. 135 x 215mm. 288pp. Illus. Bbg. ISBN 0-7099-1528-4. U.K. L12.95.] Joe Grigley There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, Nay her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out At every joint and motive of her body. -- Troilus and Cressida, IV.v. 55ff Sign language research is like a big complicated jigsaw puzzle; the more people you have around the table, the quicker the pieces find their proper places. The Second International Symposium on Sign Language Research, in Bristol, England, between 19 and 25 July 1981 (the proceedings here reviewed), was a massive attack on the puzzle: researchers from eight countries read and signed papers before an interacting audience representing seventeen nationalities. The published proceedings contains twenty-five papers on linguistic, sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, and educational implications of Sign, and almost every one inspires a contented "ahhhh" as another puzzle piece drops into place. Language in Sign is subtitled "An International Perspective on Sign Language," and this is a welcome approach at a time when Sign research -- particularly that in America -- has become increasingly narrow and technical. The perspective we get is valuable because it allows us to make much needed comparisons between national sign languages. It is common knowledge now that Sign is not universal, and early researchers like tp6e (1776), Mallery (1881), and Wundt (1900) were no doubt wrong to classify signing as a natural gestural activity. But how much they erred and in what ways they were wrong or right has never been satisfactorily answered. How different is difference? The most frequent reply is to say that signers of one country cannot readily understand those of another country, and that national dictionaries of Sign reveal different lexicons (Battison & Jordan 1976). But alas, this proves little. The dialectal variations between British English and American English present some of the same problems, but this does not mean the languages are different. Even SLS 41 Winter 83 Winter 83 JG rev. 366 signers from different parts of one country occasionally have difficulty understanding each other (Battison & Jordan 1976, Deuchar 1981). So the oft-repeated syllogism is really a bad one. The syllogism continues to break down when we look closely at the grammatical structure of Sign. The most fascinating aspect of Language in Sign is that almost every paper on Sign structure reveals a grammatical process that can be found in more than one sign language. Similarities in British and American Sign Languages have recently been noticed (Stokoe 1983, Woll et al. 1981), and it is both enlightening and reassuring to see similarity in the morphological processes of British, Swedish, Norwegian, American, and Russian Sign Languages. Consider reduplication. Fischer's examination (1973) of slow reduplication for iterative aspect modulation and fast reduplication for habitual aspect modulation is echoed in studies of Swedish Sign by Brita Bergman and of British Sign Language by Mary Brennan. The parallels are sufficiently detailed to be disarming; indeed, one is almost driven to speculate that the differences between sign languages are primarily lexical rather than morphological. Other parallels can be cited: classifiers are found in ASL by McDonald (cf. Kantor 1980, Newport 1981), in British Sign by Woll here, and in Swedish Sign by Sten Ulfsparre. Lars Wallin has discovered that compounds in Swedish Sign have undergone spatial and temporal reductions, precisely as Frishberg found in ASL (1975). Even approaches to syntax reveal parallelism; Deuchar asks if British Sign is an SVO language and concludes, as Britta Hansen has for Danish Sign (1975) and Lynn Friedman for ASL (1976), that analysis in terms of topic and comment is more appropriate. Right in Deuchar's wake comes Zaitseva, writing on Russian Sign: presence or absence of the topic of the talk may directly influence the construction of an utterance. If the topics are "given" in the situation, they need not be expressed in verbal (sign) expression. This peculiarity is situation involvement. (p. 77) Call it what you will, the fact that American, British, Danish, and Russian Sign Languages reveal similar syntactical patterns takes...