Revolution for Deaf People's Language
Lillo-Martin
A commentary on Stokoe's 1960 manuscript, "Sign Language Structure"
The Start of a Revolution for Deaf People's Language
Diane Lillo-Martin
University of Connecticut
The publication of Stokoe’s “Sign Language Structure” in 1960 started a sort of revolution,
as described by David F. Armstrong in his preface to the 2005 reprinting in the Journal of Deaf
Studies and Deaf Education. It was revolutionary in its explicit recognition that the ‘visual
communication systems’ used by deaf Americans constituted a language and could be analyzed
using the tools of linguistics. This view was not by any means commonly held, and it took quite
some time for the news to spread. Now, informed linguists would not resist the label ‘language’,
even though many still are misinformed or at least naïve about central aspects of signed languages.
Nevertheless, many in related fields are surprised or even suspicious of this conclusion, and many
who will accept the term ‘language’ still view signing as second class. So it has been a gradual
revolution; not a flash of modernity but a slow burn that has led to a long sequence of changes in
the world.
Setting
William Stokoe was perhaps an unlikely pioneer for establishing the linguistic status of
signed languages. He studied Old and Middle English literature, and taught in this field at Wells
College before being recruited to Gallaudet College (see Ruth Stokoe’s and Gilbert Eastman’s
chapters in Baker and Battison, 1980 for more of the personal story). He became interested in
linguistics, and received 6 weeks of training at Buffalo, where the approach to linguistics was
Structuralism. On this approach, when a researcher starts to analyze a previously unstudied
language, they start at the level of phonology, looking at the patterns of the sounds that comprise
words. If two different words are found that are exactly the same except for one sound, the
existence of such a minimal pair establishes the contrastiveness of the differing sounds. After all
the sound patterns are discovered, the ‘Discovery Procedures’ allow the researcher to move to the
next step of analysis. This approach to linguistic analysis drove Stokoe’s primary research
investigating the signs used by deaf students and colleagues at Gallaudet, and led to the basic
discovery that signs have parts.
Stokoe could not do this research alone. He acknowledged primarily the contributions of
deaf research assistants Carl Gustaf Croneberg and Dorothy Chiyoko Sueoka (later Casterline),
who he credited “might as easily be named co-authors”; indeed, they were named as co-authors
when the Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles was published 5 years
later (Stokoe, Casterline & Croneberg, 1965). Not only did Croneberg and Sueoka provide and
code data, they added insights that Stokoe quoted in the paper. Recognition of the role of deaf
researchers in linguistics continues to be complex and uneven.
SASLJ, Vol. 2, No. 2 – Fall/Winter 2018
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