Sign Language Structure
Stokoe, Jr.
The one full length modern study of the visual communication of the deaf is Father Bernard
Theodoor Marie Tervoort’s dissertation Structurelle analyse ́ van visuell tealgebruik binnen een
groep dove kinderen (Amsterdam, 1953). This work, though an interesting exploration of such
questions as spontaneous language origin and development and the psychological-linguistic
implications of visual instead of visual-acoustic orientation and of esoteric and exoteric languages
and their grammatical-logical categories, has actually slight bearing on the present study for
several reasons: In Holland where his observations were made, signing alone, or with simultaneous
spoken accompaniment as practiced in many American schools, is not used as a medium of
instruction. Officially prohibited, it occurs as an ‘after hours’ activity among the school children
he studied, most of them unacquainted with any sign language outside their own group. His
conclusions show that the signs they used were developed in the school group itself and tended to
vanish when the group dispersed. The signs he observed were always accomplishments of speech
or silent speech-like movements and could thus be in no way substitutes for speech. He therefore
analyzed stretches of this combined visual-oral language by using the categories of traditional
Dutch grammar. The present study is of a sign language which has a wide geographical currency
as well as a recorded persistence through more than a century, which is accepted as an educational
medium, and which will in this and projected studies be shown to have a syntactical, morphemic,
and sub-morphemic structure different from that of English. Moreover, for several reasons, the
observations in Tervoort’s study were limited to children under the ages of puberty, while the
practice in the present study is to follow the principle of choosing informants from among the
intelligent adult members of the language community.
The writer is well acquainted with Father Tervoort who is making Gallaudet College his
headquarters while engaged in a study of the language and psychological development of students
of two American schools for the deaf over a six-year period. His working hypothesis is an
extension of his original thesis that the deaf child has ‘two languages, an esoteric and an exoteric
one; one for mutual intercourse, the other for talk with outsiders’ (English summary, 1.293) and
he has stated that in the first two months of the experiment there are already indications that the
esoteric elements tend to disappear as the child matures in the direction of a more or less standard
English. With the caveat that the writer and Fr. Tervoort disagree amicably on terminology, the
writer in this context would characterize the other’s work as more in the nature of a controlled
experiment in the fields of psychology and educational method than strictly in the field of
linguistics (Trager, 1949). The writer also believes that in the experience of the American deaf
person there are two languages, not esoteric and exoteric and therefore only psychologically
distinct, but linguistically different: these two are American English, known to the deaf through
various substitutes for hearing, and the American sign language, the subject of this microlinguistic
study.
Exploration of the possibilities of sign language for international use continues also. The
World Federation of the Deaf issued at Rome in 1959 a booklet of 339 photographs (for 323 signs)
captioned by numbers only, followed by alphabetical indices of English and French words keyed
to the numbered pictures (Première contribution pour le dictionnaire international du langage des
signes, terminologie de conférence). Some of the English-word=sign-picture correspondences
seem to be identical with the word-sign equivalence generally accepted by users of the American
sign language; other words are connected with quite unfamiliar signs. There is a third category of
correspondences--the word translated by a sign which in American sign language usually renders
SASLJ, Vol. 2, No. 2 – Fall/Winter 2018
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