Not Found, Created: A Major New Source for the Study of Sign Language and Culture: [A Review of Sign Me Alice II By Gilbert Eastman]

SLS 42 Spring 84 NOT FOUND, CREATED: A MAJOR NEW SOURCE FOR THE STUDY OF SIGN LANGUAGE AND CULTURE [A review of Sign Me Alice II by Gilbert Eastman] William C. Stokoe Many who report here and elsewhere on their studies of sign language focus their questions on language, as indeed they should: How does a sign language make different kinds of syntactic structures known? How does it refer to classes of objects with similar properties? How does it inflect or otherwise modify or modulate its words? How do children acquiring it manage pronoun references, the verb system, and the rest of the things language does? These are surely questions that need to be asked, but it is important to remember that outside the laboratory or the grammarian's study, language and culture are inseparable and other questions intrude that are also worth asking: How do young partners in a marriage express in language their love and sense of union but also their individuality and different interests? How do members of a linguistic minority express their attitudes toward their language and that of the majority? How do individualities, personalities, personae of many sorts develop and become evident through use of language, and how do individuals fit into the group? How are humor and seriousness, how are everyday encounters and momentous events treated in natural language interchanges? An impediment to asking such questions has been the lack of suitable and accessible material in which to @ 1984 by Linstok Press, Inc. ISSN 0302-1475 Review: 58 seek answers. Even prolonged field study by ethnographers may come up short of answers, at least in those cultural areas closed to outsiders and therefore of the greatest interest. A related problem is that of students of sign language who petition to have it made an object of credit-carrying academic study. Even if the faculty committee appealed to recognizes the sign language as a language, it may justify its negative response with the claim that there is no culture to study and that requiring foreign language courses is intended to acquaint students with culture as well as language. Now, however, there is a new source of information both for the scientist and the educator that can supply answers to such important questions. Unfortunately, this source cannot be captured on pages like these. One of the problems, in fact, has been that in transcribing sign language phenomena into a written language both omissions and misinterpretations abound, and what is worse, are not even suspected. Inaccessibility to complete written, or spoken, description is taken as a matter of course in the fine arts. No critic of painting, sculpture, music, or dance expects even the most perspicacious work of criticism to be a substitute for looking at or listening to the work itself. (Only in linguistics, perhaps, has the apathetic fallacy taken root, that the rules "derived by" the investigator have more value than the system they are claimed to describe.) Thus it is a matter for rejoicing not regret that sign language and Deaf culture must be studied from something other than the printed page. The work, the source, here referred to is a new play by Gilbert C. Eastman, Sign Me Alice II. It is Spring 84 SLS 42 SLS 42 Review: 59 Spring 84 available through video recordings as well as in live production. Crafted in sign language like the first Sign Me Alice ten years earlier, it is performed as that was with reader's voices to allow hearing spectators who do not know signing to follow. But this incidental use of spoken English does not in the least impair the play's integrity as a source of sign language data for many kinds of study. To those dedicated to rigorous analysis of language as language, it provides a three-hour corpus. If among them there are those who consider language as performance less interesting than language their rules generate, they may take comfort in the circumstances: each utterance is the conception of the playwright, who thinks, constructs plays, and operates bilingually, first in American Sign Language, second in English. But each utterance is also the product of interaction involving the actor, also in...