Language

Gradient and gestural dimensions permeate the use of spoken language. If I want to indicate that a lecture was exceptionally fascinating, I have to draw out the appropriate part of the [End Page 176] appropriate word—in English, the stressed vowel of the adjective—along with a particular intonation contour: ‘That was a faaaascinating lecture!’. There are other conventional intonational devices to turn these words into a sarcastic dismissal of the lecture, and so forth. Or if I want you to attend to a particular person in a group, I can’t simply say ‘Look at her’; rather, I have to either point or catch your eye, and then direct my gaze at the woman in question. Due no doubt to the history of writing systems, these many everyday aspects of language use have not entered our grammatical descriptions and are marginalized with terms such as ‘paralanguage’ and ‘cospeech gesture’. (Of course, when expressive and deictic meanings are expressed segmentally by elements such as particles and demonstratives, they ‘count’ in grammatical descriptions.) Ready-made categorizations of ‘linguistic’ and ‘nonlinguistic’ are not available for the description of signed languages. Indeed, all attempts to reduce such languages to some kind of notation system cannot omit dimensions of gradience and gesture and must represent simultaneous use of manual and nonmanual means of conveying information.

Signed languages have only been recognized as full-fledged human languages for the past several decades. In the United States the opening began with William Stokoe’s now classic 1960 book, Sign language structure: An outline of the visual communication system of the American deaf. From the present perspective, it is striking to be reminded that language designations such as ASL (American Sign Language) did not yet exist some forty years ago. For the first decades of sign language research, the academic struggle was to gain the linguistic validity of sign languages by aligning them as closely as possible with grammatical descriptions of spoken languages—primarily the spoken languages of surrounding hearing communities in which sign languages had developed. Having won the battle for linguistic recognition, the debate now turns to particular factors of expressive modality—vocal or ‘corporeal’—in constraining the forms of linguistic systems. In the process, well-worn grammatical categories are facing new challenges. I introduce the term corporeal because sign languages involve simultaneous performance of the hands, limbs, torso, and many parts of the face. Corporeal expressions, of course, have spatial characteristics that are not possible for vocal expressions. It is part of the strength Scott Liddell’s book that all of these elements of signed languages are treated as part of an integrated system, rather than a familiar partitioning of signed communication into a ‘linguistic’ system with various ‘expressive’ overlays.

L is a professor at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC—the only deaf university in the world—where he chairs the Department of Linguistics. Gallaudet has recently instituted a Ph.D. program in sign language linguistics, thanks in great part to L’s pioneering efforts. He is from the first generation of American linguistic explorers of ASL, beginning with a ground-breaking 1977 doctoral dissertation on ASL syntax from the University of California at San Diego. He has made continuing major contributions to the field ever since, culminating in this monumental, rich, beautifully documented, and carefully argued monograph. The book is packed with insights—for the description and analysis of both signed and spoken languages. The reader encounters far-reaching and innovative revisions, presented thoughtfully and noncombatively. Little by little, the attentive reader will come to understand that ASL can be described without the familiar machinery of such traditional concepts as ‘agreement’ and ‘classifiers’, that categories such as ‘subjects’, ‘objects’, and ‘pronouns’ take on special characteristics in this type of language, and that even the status of ‘morpheme’ and the distinction between ‘inflection’ and ‘derivation’ can be questioned. In place, we are given a twenty-first-century approach to language, heavily influenced by Ronald...