David F. Armstrong

Iconicity, Arbitrariness, & Duality of Patterning in Signed & Spoken Language: Perspectives on Language Evolution

Introduction. One of the hallmarks of human languages is their ability to incorporate signs that have no obvious physical relationship to the objects, actions, ideas, emotions, or other entities to which they refer. Languages also have the capacity to incorporate signs with varying degrees of relatedness to their referent. I use sign here and not word, because I intend for this discussion to include signed languages as well as spoken languages. I will use the general term sign to refer both to the words and morphemes of spoken languages and to the gestural signs of signed languages. The present discussion will be oriented toward elucidating the nature of arbitrariness of relationship between sign and referent in signed and spoken languages and will include observations about the biological bases of this phenomenon.

Brain Laterality in Signed and Spoken Language: A Synthetic Theory of Language Use

First, the hypothesis is examined that right hemispheric cognitive processes underlie human language in a fundamental way, and specifically, that the right hemisphere is implicated in the semantic processes underlying the establishment of meaning and in processing of linguistic “gestalts” generally. In this respect, several lines of evidence are examined, including the performance of aphasics, commisurotomy patients, native deaf signers, and users of Japanese and Chinese ideographs. A right hemispheric basis for various aspects of language use having been established, a second hypothesis is examined: that differences in societal complexity are related to differences in relative dependence upon cognitive processes controlled by the right and the left cerebral hemispheres. More specifically, we examine the hypothesis that growth in societal complexity has been accompanied by increased dependence upon left hemisphere processes. We present quantitative evidence from studies of differences in language structure to support the hypothesis. More broadly, what we are attempting here is to construct a synthetic theory of language use that incorporates information from the neurological and the social sciences.

The Gestural Theory of Language Origins

The idea that iconic visible gesture had something to do with the origin of language, particularly speech, is a frequent element in speculation about this phenomenon and appears early in its history. Socrates hypothesizes about the origins of Greek words in Platos satirical dialogue, Cratylus, and his speculation includes a possible role for sound based iconicity as well as for the visual gestures employed by the deaf. Platos use of satire to broach this topic also points to the fine line between the sublime and the ridiculous that has continued to be a hallmark of this sort of speculation. This paper will present recent evidence supporting the idea that language first arose as visible gesture. This evidence is culled from several lines of research, including research on the neurological underpinnings of gesture, i.e., research on mirror neurons; new research on the gestural communication of African apes; research on the cognitive basis of the signed languages of the deaf; and research on the emergence of new signed languages.

William C. Stokoe and the Study of Signed Languages

The right man in the right place at the right time. THIS VOLUME CELEBRATES the work of William C. Stokoe, one of the most influential language scholars of the twentieth century. To understand his impact on both the educational fortunes of deaf people and on the science of language, it is necessary to consider briefly the status of these two related fields in the early 1950s. The almost universal educational goal for deaf people at this time was acquisition of spoken language and the ability to discern speech on the lips - other educational goals, including the acquisition of general knowledge, were arguably secondary to the development of oral skills. It was perhaps not coincidental that linguistic science had no interest in the gestural language of deaf people - language was synonymous with speech. This point is well captured in the title of one of the most influential books on linguistics of the first half of the twentieth century, Edward Sapirs Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech. Sapir, writing in the 1920s, dismissed sign languages as substitution codes for spoken languages - speech was dominant (Sapir 192 1: 21). The views of experts on deaf education in the mid-1950s may be best summed up by H elm er Myklebust, a product of Gallaudets graduate school. The manual language used by the deaf is an ideographic language . . . it is more pictorial, less symbolic. . . . Ideographic language systems, in comparison with verbal systems, lack precision, subtlety, and flexibility. It is likely that Man cannot achieve his ultimate potential through an Ideographic language. . . . The manual sign language must be viewed as inferior to the verbal as a language. (Myklebust 1957: 241-42) Its all here in this short passage: sign language is equated with the despised, non- alphabetic writing system of a ? on- West em people (the Chinese), it is said to lack the precision of speech, and it is stated, without any evidence, that deaf people will not achieve their full potential through its use. When Stokoe arrived at Gallaudet in 1955, he was entering an environment that was dominated by thinking like this. His achievements with respect to the value of signed languages were essentially fourfold. Stokoes first achievement was to realize that the signed language his students used among themselves had all the important characteristics common to spoken languages and that it had the same potential for human communication. His second achievement was to devise a descriptive system that would convince language scholars of these facts. This was what gave him the legitimacy to pursue his third achievement - convincing much of the general public and the educational establishment of the human and educational value of allowing deaf children to communicate in natural signed languages. His fourth grand achievement was then to apply what he had learned from the study of signed languages to the larger problems of the nature and evolution of the human capacity for language. In his introduction to this volume, I. King Jordan refers to Stokoe as being in the right place at the right time, and we will elaborate on that theme here. Before he arrived at Gallaudet, Stokoe, of course, had had little experience communicating with deaf people and no professional training in the education of deaf children. It is a matter of great interest to understand why Stokoe was able to see these things when the bulk of professionals trained in the relevant areas could not - if we come to even a partial answer to this question, we will have gained a bit of insight into the nature of human genius. With hindsight, it seems obvious that one of the things he had going for him was precisely his lack of training (or prejudice) in areas relevant to deafness. He also brought a first-rate mind (an inquiring mind) and training in the study of language generally (he had bachelors and Ph.D. degrees in English from Cornell). The final ingredients seem to have been his persistence (some would say his obstinacy), his predisposition to question authority and a well-developed sense of fairness or justice (see Maher 1986, for a discussion of his childhood, his education, and his first years at Gallaudet) . …

Review Article: The World Turned Inside Out

In Deaf in America, Padden and Humphries have created a much needed addition to the literature on deafness and deaf people -- an account of the language and culture of Deaf people grounded in modem social science theory but produced by deaf people. In doing this they have accomplished, in Harlan Lanes terms, a look at Deaf culture from inside out and from outside in at the same time -- a miracle and a delight (from the books dust jacket). Part of the delight of this book is the balance it strikes between the technical observation of the social scientist and the clear writing needed for a general audience. It also advocates in a non-strident but exceedingly effective way the right of Deaf people to create a way of life appropriate to their biological makeup. As a hearing person, I found two of their analyses to be particularly compelling: their explication of the central origin myth of North American Deaf society, and their analysis of the culturally based meaning of sound to deaf people. This latter analysis, as well as being compelling is also highly entertaining. (Incidentally, since the invention of the modem water closet, hearing boys have shared one of the dilemmas faced by their deaf counterparts, as described in Deaf in America: whether to urinate directly into the water or to aim for the side of the porcelain bowl, though the former do have hearing for monitoring the performance.

Le corps et la metaphore dans les langues gestuelles: A la recherche des modes de production des signes (The body and metaphor in gestural languages: In search of the modes of production of signs) (review)

Tuf768uf765 uf771uf775uf765uf773uf774uf769uf76fuf76e of the centrality of iconicity and indexicality has been a nagging one in the linguistics of signed languages, almost from the beginning of modern attempts to describe these languages in linguistic terms. This is so because of the linguistic doctrine, enunciated by Saussure and many others, of the ‘‘arbitrariness of the sign.’’ According to this doctrine, linguistic signs are fundamentally unmotivated—that is, signs are purely symbolic, linked to their referents only by convention. Thus, the ‘‘specter of iconicity,’’ the obvious fact that many signs of signed languages are motivated, has haunted the linguistics of these languages from the inception of the enterprise (Wilcox uf731uf739uf739uf736). Wilcox suggests that sign linguists have taken several approaches in the attempt to banish this pesky poltergeist:

Will it Ever?: A Review of When the Mind Hears by Harlan Lane

The rise and fall Admirers of Harlan Lanes earlier of signing schools. work dealing with the history of deaf education (The Wild Boy of Aveyron, 1976) will not be disappointed by this attempt to capture the lives and times of Laurent Clerc, T. H. and E. M. Gallaudet, and A. G. Bell. First a word about the title. It comes from a translation of a lovely quotation attributed to Victor Hugo and directed to Ferdinand Berthier, the great deaf teacher of the deaf:

The Deaf Way

The Deaf Way Les sourds, cest comme ca, by Yves Delaporte (Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de lHomme, 2002, 398 pp. 28 . ISBN 2735109356. ISSN 0758 5888). THIS VOLUME PRESENTS an ethnographic account of the signing Deaf community of France, a population traditionally known as sourd-muet, deaf-mute. For reasons that I discuss briefly in this review, the use of the term muet in France (and the corresponding term in the United States) has fallen out of popular favor. A reviewer discussing this book in English is immediately faced with the question of how to translate the title. At first glance, something like The Deaf, Thats How It Is might seem appropriate. However, consideration of the French Sign Language (LSF) sign that Delaporte translates into French as cest comme ca suggests an alternate (American) English title. Because of a shared linguistic heritage, the same sign with the same meaning exists in American Sign Language (ASL). As Delaporte explains (i 13-20), the LSF sign originated as the third-person possessive pronoun and retained its current meaning as a new sign for the pronoun evolved. In its current meaning, it is a tag for descriptions of behavior that French deaf people take as being particularly illustrative of their culture-almost always expressed in terms of its differences from the culture of the dominant hearing/speaking majority. In this regard, when it follows the sign for deaf, it might be translated as the deaf, its their thing. In ASL, the sign retains its function as the possessive pronoun as well as the meaning just described in FSL, and the whole phrase, beginning with the sign for deaf, has been translated into English as the deaf way, the English name and ASL sign phrase for two international festivals celebrating the arts and culture of the world Deaf community, sponsored by Gallaudet University. What is significant about all of this is the self-definition of the Deaf community according to its alterity, or otherness-its fundamental separation from the hearing population within which it is immersed. The central fact of life for deaf people in industrial societies, especially people born deaf, is the difficulty posed by the need to communicate with hearing people. For the deaf people of France and the rest of Europe and perhaps to a lesser extent those of North America, this problem has been compounded since the i88os by the refusal of the educational establishment to allow them to be educated in their own natural signed languages, accompanied by attempts to prevent the use of these languages even outside the classroom. DeIaporte reveals the complicity of the medical establishment in the denial of deafness and mutism-defining them as medical problems to be overcome by prosthesis and rigid oral training, with parents avoiding the use of sign language at all costs. The typical result has been a more or less complete failure of the formal educational process. These restrictions are only now being eased in much of the Western world, to be replaced by a new form of prosthesis, the cochlear implant, seen by signing Deaf communities as a new threat to their viability. The case of cochlear implants is particularly revealing of the central difference between the deaf and all other cultural and linguistic groups. Less than 10 percent of deaf children have deaf parents, and perhaps 90 percent of the children of deaf adults are hearing. Thus, the medical and educational destinies of most deaf children are controlled by hearing parents. The language and culture, in general, are not transmitted in the usual way, from parents to their children. Instead, these have been transmitted to the signing deaf in educational establishments, prototypically residential schools for deaf children, although the tiny minority of deaf people who come from multigenerational deaf families plays a disproportionate role in this process. The histories of Deaf communities, and especially the French Deaf community, are to a great extent the histories of the great residential schools (see Lane 1984; Van Cleve and Crouch 1989). …

Language, Cognition, and the Brain: Insights from Sign Langauge Research (review)

Language, Cognition, and the Brain: Insights from Sign Language Research, by Karen Emmorey (Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum, 2002. 383 pp.) THIS BOOK PRESENTS an up-to-date summary, discussion, and analysis of research on the representation of language in the human brain, with special attention to the representation of signed language, most especially American Sign Language as used by deaf signers. Emmorey, one of the leading researchers in this area, sets out to examine the extent to which neurolinguistic research on sign language users can shed light on several questions at the heart of recent controversy in the study of language. She succeeds admirably in presenting, synthesizing, and interpreting a large and complex body of information in a format that will make this information widely accessible. A brief review of the chapter topics gives a sense of the scope of the book. Chapter 1, the introduction, presents information on the development of Nicaraguan Sign Language, to illustrate the processes through which signed languages develop, and it also debunks some of the popular misconceptions about these languages. Chapter 2, The Structure of American Sign Language: Linguistic Universals and Modality Effects, reviews sign language phonology and syntax, pointing out similarities, but also differences, in organization, having to do with the use of space in signed languages (SLs). The ramifications of the use of space in SLs and what it can reveal about the universal neurological underpinnings of language in general is the focus of the remainder of the book, which is divided into seven additional chapters, dealing with the following topics: language and space, psycholinguistics of sign perception and production, sign language acquisition, the critical-period hypothesis, memory for sign language, the impact of sign language use on visuospatial cognition, and sign language and the brain. This book will be challenging for nonspecialists, but summaries at the ends of the chapters may prove useful even if some details of the technical research are beyond the reach of the reader-the reader will be getting high-level summaries of findings and interpretation from a major practitioner in this field. Many will find that the reference list alone is a major resource. The remainder of this review focuses on three aspects of signing in which the similarities and differences with speech are especially revealing-the analogous use of space through classifier constructions, the acquisition of language by children, and hemispheric representation in the brain. The pivotal chapter is the third, The Confluence of Language and Space. According to Emmorey, Classifier constructions are the primary linguistic structure used to express both concrete and abstract concepts of motion and location. ASL signers also exploit signing space to schematically represent spatial relations, time, and aspects of conceptual structure. When signers describe spatial relations, there is a structural analogy between the form of a classifier construction and aspects of the described scene. (115) In other words, the nature of the structural relationship between the form of the signed utterance and the described scene is generally iconic (either directly or by metaphoric extension). The idea that ASL grammar is at least partly analog is not new (e.g., DeMatteo 1977), and it has been hotly contested. What is now possible, and what Emmorey does, is to give us a comprehensive account of the interplay of analog and digital processes in ASL and the consequences of this complexity for both language acquisition by children and the consequent representation of these processes in the brain. In fact, what Emmorey makes clear is that, far from marking ASL as simpler or more primitive than speech, an old prejudice, analog processes such as classifier constructions may be extremely complex and difficult to acquire: In sum, children do not acquire the ASL classifier system easily or without error, despite the clear iconicity of the system. …

Comment on Pulleyblank: Duality in Language Evolution

Pulleyblank has previously presented a convincing argument for the importance of duality of patterning in the evolution of language and, indeed, in the evolution of human cognitive capabilities generally (Pulleyblank 1983). This paper extends some of his ideas. In the course of this argument he calls into question the possession of duality by signed languages, and before going too far with this argument we should give some consideration to what duality refers to. Here are some commonly cited elements of duality: The human vocal apparatus is capable of producing a vast array of sounds. Each language incorporates a very small and relatively fixed number of these, ahd the sets of sounds, so incorporated, differ from language to language. The rules in a given language for generating morphemes from the stock of phonemes are independent of the rules for generating meaningful utterances (words and sentences) from the stock of morphemes. This is the general statement of the principle of duality of patterning or double articulation. For reasons that will be discussed at greater length below, these elements relating to duality of patterning imply that languages having this