William C. Stokoe and the Gestural Theory of Language Origins

The American architect Frank Lloyd Wright was once asked how he could conceive and oversee so many projects. He answered, “I can’t get them out fast enough.” Wright was not talking about buildings; he was talking about ideas. He couldn’t get his ideas out fast enough.

Bill Stokoe also was an architect of ideas. Like Wright’s Falling-water, Stokoe’s ideas have a simple beauty that belies the radical way in which they have changed our intellectual landscape.

We are sometimes hesitant to mention beauty in the same breath as science. To many people, beauty seems to lie more in the realm of art. We tell ourselves that science is about objective facts, while art is about subjective qualities such as beauty. The history of science shows that the dichotomy between art and science is false. As David Gerlernter, professor of computer science at Yale University, reminds us, “We believe implicitly that the scientist is one type, the artist a radically different one. In fact, the scientific and artistic personalities overlap more than they differ, and the higher we shimmy into the leafy canopy of talent, the closer the two enterprises seem” (Gelernter 1998, 10).

We all know Bill Stokoe for his most famous idea: that the signs he saw his deaf students using at Gallaudet University were a language. We have heard a great deal about the impact of this idea in the decades since Stokoe first let it flutter down from the canopy. This chapter discusses another of Stokoe’s grand ideas: the idea that language began as gesture.

Stokoe would be the first to point out that the gestural theory of language origins is not his unique creation. Centuries ago, philosophers such as Condillac, Herder, and Vico expounded gestural theories of language origins. Many of Stokoe’s colleagues, including Adam Kendon, David Armstrong, and Frank Wilson, have contributed to modern gestural theory. But Stokoe’s contribution is unique, and it is expressed most succinctly in a notion that unites his two grand ideas—the notion of semantic phonology.

I must admit that when I first began reading about and talking to Stokoe about the gestural theory of language origins, I was not convinced. It simply challenged too many of my basic assumptions about language. Once, while Stokoe, David Armstrong, and I were working on Gesture and the Nature of Language, I expressed my concern to Stokoe. “You know, Bill,” I said, “I think some people are going to read our book and conclude that we’re crazy.” His response was, “Well, I’ve been there before!”

What finally opened my eyes to the gestural theory of language origins was the theory’s beauty—a beauty that I only dimly perceived at first. The gestural theory of language origins, and Stokoe’s unique notion of semantic phonology, possess a beauty that results from the “happy marriage of simplicity and power” (Gelernter 1998). This theoretical beauty is recognized by scientists as elegance.

Stokoe always strived for simplicity. When his idea that signs might be a language began to have an impact on linguists, the immediate reaction was to elaborate his idea, to add complications. Stokoe, on the other hand, thought he had already made the idea too complicated when he first proposed that a sign is composed of three parts: handshape, location, and movement. As others complicated, Stokoe simplified. He came to believe that a sign is more simply described as composed of only two parts: something that acts and its action.

In his seminal article on semantic phonology, Stokoe described his search for simplicity, as follows:

What I propose is not complicated at all; it is dead simple to begin with. I call it semantic phonology. It invites one to look at a sign . . . as simply a marriage of a noun and a verb. . . . [O]ne needs only to think of a sign as something that acts together with its action; it’s that simple: no features, no autosegments, no orientation, no contacting or contacted parts, no HOLDs, no MOVEs, no tiers, no tears—just something...