Introduction

The following three articles were written as a result of meetings of the European Science Foundation InterSign Network. The European Science Foundation (ESF) is a nongovernmental European association of national research funding organizations that enables European scientists to work together on topics of common interest, and to discover and define new areas of research that benefit from international cooperation. One of its stated aims is to promote the mobility of researchers and the free flow of information and ideas. In 1997, the ESF provided the necessary funds for establishing the research network “InterSign: Sign Linguistics and Data Exchange.” This network was coordinated by Anne Baker at the University of Amsterdam and Harry van der Hulst, who at the time was at the University of Leiden. The network operated from 1997 to 2000 and resulted in five research meetings attended by InterSign committee members from six European countries and specialists from other countries in Europe and beyond.

Although research into sign languages in Europe has increased greatly over the last ten years, European Sign Language research has lagged behind that carried out in the United States. However, Europe is the only place in the world where several different sign languages are being actively studied within a relatively small area. This creates a situation where crosslinguistic exploration can be a very real possibility. In general, sign linguistics requires methods and techniques especially related to the representation of sign language data and data exchange. The InterSign Network is designed to develop standards and guidelines for the study of European sign languages. Its meetings were concerned with these matters with respect to lexical databases, the representation and coding of the form of signs at the phonetic, phonological, morphosyntactic and textual level, text corpora, and sign language acquisition.

The three articles in this issue of Sign Language Studies arose as a result of one of the InterSign network meetings that considered phonology, matters of phonological analysis, and transcription in European Sign Languages. It was held in Leiden, Netherlands, in December 1998 and was jointly organized by Harry van der Hulst (then at Leiden University and now at the University of Connecticut), Penny Boyes-Braem (Center for Sign Language Research in Basel, Switzerland) and myself, Rachel Sutton-Spence (Centre for Deaf Studies, Bristol University, England).

For further information about the aims of the ESF, the InterSign Network, and the outcomes of the Leiden meeting on phonology, readers are directed to the InterSign web page at http://www.signlang.uni-hamburg.de/Intersign. The details will not be considered further here. In fact, the three articles presented in this issue were not directly the focus of that meeting but came out of it as a result of the sort of information exchange and discussion for which the InterSign Network was founded. During discussions of the phonologies of sign languages and the attempts to code them, it emerged that certain poetic uses of sign languages presented us with useful examples of the phonological parameters of each language. Several of the participants with interest in sign language poetry discussed the relationship between phonology and poetry. Their focus is more on poetry than phonology, but they all use a phonological basis or, more generally, analyses of structural regularities at the sublexical level, for at least part of their treatment of the poems.

Why should linguists consider sign language poetry at all? Poetry is usually considered the domain of the literature and language departments, not linguistics. However, with the field of deaf studies still in its infancy, there is no established field of sign language literary criticism. There has been no widespread, detailed, in-depth study of the mechanisms of sign language poetry as a specific genre. Students of sign languages are rarely taught how to watch, understand, evaluate, and write critically about poetry. Pragmatically, until such a field emerges, sign linguists will be people with some of the most readily available tools to carry this out...