Afterword
Meier
ASL. 1960 was also the year in which Charles F. Hockett published a still-famous paper
on “design features” of human language. Hockett identified 13 features which, he thought,
are characteristic of all human languages. He wrote that the first one—the vocal-auditory
channel—“is perhaps the most obvious” (p. 90). He acknowledged that there are “systems
of communication that use other channels…”; gesture was one of his examples. But, in that
1960 paper, Hockett did not explain why the vocal-auditory channel is such an obvious
design feature; he only suggested that “The vocal-auditory channel has the advantage—at
least for primates—that it leaves much of the body free for other activities that can be
carried out at the same time.”
Prior to 1960, twentieth-century linguists found little reason to be interested in
signed languages. Leonard Bloomfield (1933, p. 39) wrote:
“Some communities have a gesture language which upon occasion
they use instead of speech. Such gesture languages have been observed
among the lower-class Neapolitans, among Trappist monks (who have
made a vow of silence), among the Indians of our western plains (where
tribes of different language met in commerce and war), and among groups
of deaf-mutes.
“It seems certain that these gesture languages are merely
developments of ordinary gestures and that any and all complicated or not
immediately intelligible gestures are based on the conventions of ordinary
speech.”
Bloomfield was immensely interested in certain minority languages—for example, the
Algonquian languages of Native North America. But his interests did not extend to the
“gesture languages” that he listed.
This intellectual context helps us to understand the significance of Stokoe’s
research; he was not working in an intellectual tradition that was congenial to signed
languages. But, thanks to Stokoe, 1960 was the year in which the field of linguistics started
to understand that linguistic methods of analysis could encompass signed as well as spoken
languages. By identifying pairs of signs that differed in just one parameter, he led us to
understand that there is sublexical structure within signs as well as words. In her
commentary, Diane Lillo-Martin writes that this was a “revolution for deaf people’s
language.” Stokoe’s work also brought forth a revolution in linguistics, a revolution that
gathered force with the work of Edward Klima and Ursula Bellugi (1979). This revolution
sparked fundamental changes in our understanding of what a human language is; we now
know that the vocal-auditory channel is not a necessary design feature of human languages.
Instead, the purview of linguistics would forever be expanded to include signed and spoken
languages. Through the work of Stokoe and his successors, linguistics has learned
something fundamental about what it means to be human—that the human language
capacity is plastic and allows naturally-evolved languages in two channels (and perhaps
three, if we consider the tactile-gestural signing of Deaf-Blind people).
SASLJ, Vol. 2, No. 2 – Fall/Winter 2018
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