Tell Me Where is Grammar Bred?: “Critical Evaluation” or Another Chorus of “Come Back to Milano?”

Stokoe : 31 TELL ME WHERE IS GRAMMAR BRED?: "CRITICAL EVALUATION" OR ANOTHER CHORUS OF "COME BACK TO MILANO?" William C. Stokoe In a journal like this a review article is expected to scrutinize the matter of the book or books reviewed 1 without much attention to the manner -- to ask, in this instance, about sign language and deaf people: What is claimed? What is the evidence and how is it presented? To what degree is the claim sustained? Although a review in this vein could not do justice to van Uden's book, I will begin by addressing these questions, then turn to the larger issue. What is claimed?-- The claim is negative and so it is difficult to prove as are all negatives. It amounts, in fact, to denying that, given a proper definition of "language," there is any such thing as a sign language. The claim is divided according to the subsystems of linguistics; it denies that the signing of deaf people has a true phonology, a morphology and syntax, and a semology or pragmatics. It will therefore be considered first under these headings. 1. Van Uden, rev. Dr. A. (1986). Sign Languages Used by Deaf People, and Psycholinguistics: A Critical Evaluation. Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger. viii & 126 pp. 15 X 22.5 cm. Cloth. ISBN 90-265-0701-1. Hfl4l.75. Copyright ( 1987 by Linstok Press, Inc. See note inside Front cover. ISSN 0302-1475 SLS 54 Spring 1987 Stokoe : 32 -- of phonology? Chapter 3, "A 'Phonology' of Sign Languages?" ends thus: We cannot subscribe to the following theses of amongst others Bellugi and co-workers (1976): "These ... systematic formational properties ... are like the phonemes of spoken language in general arbitrary in terms of meaning," ... "Deaf people do not encode signs in terms of their iconic representational properties," ... "Iconic aspects of signs ... are entirely disregarded (by the deaf), etc. [closing "'s missing] On the contrary, we think that the elements in the signs are mainly aimed at the depiction (not to be understood purely visual, see above) like bricks for a house, lines for a drawing, notes for music, etc. Their structure is basically determined by the content, not by purely functional relationships. They are basically iconic elements... (p. 51) This conclusion is reached by an argument that "the manual deaf" (van Uden's term throughout for deaf people who have not totally abjured signing and become quasi-hearing through oral education) understand and recall signs because of "the content, especially the imagery content," of all manual signs (p. 51). To sustain this argument, he misreports Bellugi's famous and often replicated test of short-term memory for isolated signs (Bellugi et al. 1975): "Further, quite a lot of confusion appeared to occur; this was iconic ... 'Name' was confused with 'egg'..." (p. 46). Readers familiar with the literature will recall, of course, that there was no confusion -- that recall scores and accuracy scores in all these tests are high, and when errors do occur, when the number and rapidity of sign presentations goes up, these errors are not errors of content but of sign elements. The subject misremembers one aspect of a sign as another such aspect (e.g. substituting the movement in NAME for that in EGG). Spring 1987 SLS 54 Stokoe : 33 The claim that signs are "basically iconic" used to depict, not to symbolize, can be refuted by a single instance. The anthropologist Hubert Smith's films of deaf signers in a Yucatec Mayan village in Mexico2 show a sign language entirely uninfluenced by outside signs or signers. This sign language, known and used by all the villagers (but with more or less proficiency according to their relation to deaf persons), has a systematic way of referring to family members. The base sign is made in front of the signer, and if the semantic feature [female] is to be added, the signing hand touches the back of the neck. For 'father' or 'mother' the sign begins with the thumb edge of the horizontal hand touching the upper edge of the brow. For the eldest sibling this sign is made lower; Smith, in a lecture at Gallaudet University (28 Jan 1987), said and showed in the film...