Comment on Pulleyblank: Duality in Language Evolution

Summer 1986 COMMENT ON PULLEYBLANK Duality in Language Evolution William Stokoe As editor I am delighted that Pulleyblank and Armstrong chose these pages for continuing their discussion of the place of signed systems in the origin and evolution of language. As a keenly interested observer of this discussion I am even more delighted that they have permitted me to participate. Both have seen in sign languages some evidence of duality of patterning -- the sine qua non of languages as some would have it. Pulleyblank here debates in the negative, or at least with much skepticism, the question he states at the beginning of his fifth paragraph: "It has also been claimed with considerable confidence that ASL and other sign languages of the same kind have duality of patterning like spoken languages" (p. 104 above). The crux is in the precise force of the word "like." The essential characteristic of linguistic duality lies, I take it, in the way that a language attaches meaning to certain symbols (morphemes) formed systematically from other symbols (phonemes) virtually without meaning; and also, as Armstrong points out, in the independence of its word forming system from its phrase and sentence forming system. To expect complete "structural parallelism between sign language and spoken Q 1986 by Linstok Press, Inc. See inside front cover. ISSN 0302-1475 135 SLS 51 Comments, WCS : 136 language" (112), however, is to disregard the difference between the voice and the upper body as signal sources, and between the senses of hearing and vision as signal receptors. Consequently, nearly all the iconicity, so much written about in discussions of signed languages, is accounted for simply by the nature of vision and the nature of the everyday world. Visible signs are much more apt than spoken words (with or without duality of patterning) to resemble in some way the common things they signify. The nature of spoken language phonology may not be as completely understood as Pulleyblank seems to imply; some linguists grant the name "phoneme" only to vowels and consonants, others would admit features of intonation (see Bolinger 1985, 1986). If "one has to postulate some kind of phonological distinction to account for any minimal pair" (111), then the difference one hears when the word gay is spoken with its traditional and with its more recent meaning must be phonemic, but it has not been described. Just so, or more so, sign linguists differ on what it is that contrasts. Nevertheless, sign language morphemes are constructed one way from one kind of phenomena and spoken language morphemes are constructed another way from a different kind of phenomena. The way they are constructed, the selection of certain bits of material to be used and the disregard of others, the occurrence together of certain elements but not of others, the sharpness of the contrasts between "what is done" and what is not -- all these matters encompassed by "phonology" are matters of language and not of the mode of language expression. They are discernible in both spoken and signed language morphemes. Nevertheless, the Summer 1986 SLS 51 Comments, WCS : 137 difference in the material and in the sensory receptor systems entails some structural differences as well. The hand or hands moving, the movements, the region of the moving, and also the facial expression, the gaze, and the head and body posture of the signer are all visible more or less at the same time. The sounds (the features of which are simultaneous) that compose a spoken morpheme issue sequentially from the sound source. It is thus impossible that there could be an exact parallel in phonology between a signed language and a spoken language -- even without considering the neurological difference between hearing and vision. One argument from presumed evolution that Pulleyblank uses against duality of patterning in sign languages seems to me questionable. "If.. .language could and did become fully efficient in the visual mode [i.e. equipped with duality], why did it also develop in the more difficult auditory mode...?" (105) Whether duality developed or did not develop in visible signs before it developed in audible speech is not determined by what may have happened later. Pulleyblank does not immediately address his own rhetorical...