Thursday, June 7, 2007

William Stokoe: Sign Language Structure

Those with a semiotic bent may find fresh perspectives in Sign Language and Structure, by WIlliam C. Stokoe.
Stokoe, WIlliam C. Sign Language and Structure: The first linguistic analysis of American Sign Language. Silver Spring, MD: Linstock, 1978.

Stokoe's analysis of ASL is straightforward and basic. An early entry in a still-sparse field, it presumes no prior knowledge of signs and only a basic grasp of semiotics. For me, it verifited a few things that maybe should have been obvious.

Those of us who study literature study language that endures visually. One may well imagine Paradise Lost as sounds, but we have lost Milton's sounds in a way that we have not lost those of Joni Mitchell or John Coltrane. The recorded objects themselves, to which we refer and against which we true our conceptions of those sounds, make no more noise than the flipping of pages.

As such, we work in a visual medium. Yet ASL and similar sign languages are the only native visual languages, the only languages that anyone learns somewhat in the way that most of us learn our respective mother tongues. Since most of the deaf are deaf from birth or near-birth, they use signs as a native language: informally and formally, for public address and for private conversation, for personal calculation and for internal revery. I looked up Stokoe to see how native visual speakers inflect language, to see what implications that might have for inherently but backhandedly visual forms, like verse.

A few observations --

Visual and aural media use time differently because visual signs tend to endure. This is to a certain extent true even for signing, in which the signs generally skip by as quickly as speech; by extension, it should be at least as true for electronic presentations in which writing appears and disappears in response to links. Stokoe's appraisal in 1978 is interesting:
. . . significance rests not in the configuration, the position, or the movement, but in the unique composition of all three. The sign morpheme, however, unlike the morpheme or word of the spoken language, is seen as simultaneously not sequentially produced. Analysis of the sign morpheme then cannot be segmentation in time but must be aspectual (78).

But Stokoe complicates this observation by pointing out elsewhere that all signs for what we might consider words involve movement. Given that some signs will consist of a single morpheme, these must involve a certain temporality, however they might be considered.

Perhaps we hearing should not be surprised, since we take writing to move when it stays fairly still.

These signs must be temporal in two ways. They must be so first in the sense of taking up time in their own demonstration, given that the movement that defines the signing must not only take some time, but must pass slowly enough to register with a second party, another fluent signer; clearly, both signer and viewer take them as temporal in that way. Then, to whatever extent the signer cannot produce all the signs of a discourse at once, those signs must be interpreted as ordinal or sequential.
Stokoe may mean that each morpheme need be considered as a unit, as a kind of time-moment, but one might complain that this is just what we do with spoken language, the very process that he terms segmentation. Or he may refer to the simultaneous production of signs that arises when he discusses the utility of a signer's second hand:
. . . the signer may have a rhetorical use for the inactive hand. The left hand (of a right-handed signer) may hold a dez handshape [one that designates significance by its configuration] used in a sign for namign a person, while the right hand alone 'says something' perhaps about what another person did to the first (60).

This is something that cannot be done exclusively with a single voice. The parallels in speech-acts and in writing that one may consider make for some interesting consideration.

  1. A title hangs on a page and refers to all the within.

  2. An illustration, or, conversely, a caption

  3. Italics, in Faulkner, for instance

  4. A chord

  5. A quickly picked guitar riff over a bass line with fewer notes.

  6. A lecture with Powerpoint slides

  7. According to Kristeva, Celine's use of invective

  8. A navigational element in an HTML frameset or CSS layout.

  9. A facial expression deliberately held and emphasized to accompany discouse (cf Grotowski on "organic" gestures, BTW!)


Of course there's no ending such a list conveniently. But I at least find it convenient to not think of interpretation of spoken language as breaking down into segments exactly, but into frames that include information external to what's accepted as linguistic or semantically active. For instance, the word fire means something different in a crowded theater than at an execution not because the syntax of the utterance has changed but because the most likely conclusion is different.

Some mechanism of this sort has to be operating fairly constantly to feed in the kinds of factors analyzed by Austin and others as speech acts. But this mechanism itself allows us to use aspects of discourse that we usually dismiss as nonlinguistic to create syntactic landscapes. It generally makes no syntactic difference to War and Peace that it be printed in 12-point or 10-point font, for example. But I take the larger print at the start of a chapter or on a page before the beginning of the novel to be a title. Further, I take it to name the work, and in doing so to modify without intermediary all the small print that accompanies it.

Again, one could go on about intonation and pitch and loudness and so forth, but short of explaining how these function, the point is probably too obvious: nonsemantic aspects of discourse mark phrase boundaries and other aspects of semantic elements and syntactic relations. These things may seem extraneous to literature or perhaps obtusely technical, but it seems something of this nature is needed to comprehend things like the continua of punctuation in Dickinson; Pound's "composition by the page"; the concrete poets or the "artists' books" from the 1980's; the dynamic relationship between layout, phrasing, paragraphing, and metanarrative in contemporary Website design; or, really, free verse.

Hamlin Garland

Garland's constellation of stories sort of fits between Washington Irving and The Country of Pointed Firs. The tales are related and mutually informative, but not temporally ordered or causally linked in any tight way. Like a few early hypertexts (Victory Garden and Patchwork Girl, for instance), he uses a visual metaphor in attempt to link events without tight chronological relationship.

The text shares a sentimentality with Jewett and Irving. Unline a lot of Irving, the style remains level. Unlike Firs, the characters don't necessarily know each other, though they could.

Garland handles dialect sort of like Twain or Howells: he misspells words to render pronunciation, presumably according to some eastern seaboard accent that he would have considered standard. The characters' syntax appears fairly mainstream, though, even when their pronunciation does not, and I wonder whether he didn't clean it up a bit or whether the dialect wasn't just more standard than my grandmother's rural Pennsylvanian or my grandfather's Texas-Arizona guttersnipe patois.

A lot of the value here would seem to come with the sense of place and social class. He doesn't mask the poverty or approve of it backhandedly, though he romances the people a bit; the portrayal is sincere and goodhearted as are Steinbeck's depression scenes, even similar in a lot of ways.

Saturday, June 2, 2007

Frege, Fragments, Fregments

Frege, Gottlieb. "On Sense and Meaning." Critical Theory Since 1965 Eds. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle. Tallahassee: U Fla, 1986.

I get a different vision of the relation of sentence and fragment as I read Frege on "subordinate sentences or clauses," (630). For all I know, he may have intended to refer to subordinate clauses in both cases, but the sudden recognition that of course certain sentences are subordinate to others made me extend ideas about how syntax crosses the so-called full stop.

Comp students have troubles with sentences in part because sentences in print don't operate exactly like sentences in speech. Those of us who write fluently may presume binary oppositions for ideas less oppositionally represented in speech. For instance, take the absolute nature of the period. Comp profs speak as though no information were carried over between sentences, or perhaps as though nothing in one sentence should determine the interpretation or at least the predication of the next. Of course, on examination, this is not at all true. Since it is not, the "incompleteness" of a fragment has to be relative.

As an aside, check Samuel Beckett's Nohow On, particularly the central of the three narratives, for the use of fragments. It's interesting to see the evolution of Beckett's work from the early items from the standard punctuation of the early work through the famous so-called (but NOT by Beckett himself) Trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, wherein the comma seems to drop off SB's keyboard; to How It Is which is without punctuation; to Nohow On and the last narratives, which often isolate predicative units from modifiers that can apply to various predicative units. It's a study: he does almost the identical thing in slightly more refined and compressed ways as time goes on. And he keeps at it over 50 years or so.

Even in standard writing, pronoun and noun-related things cross over period ends; they more often stop at paragraph ends in exposition. As I continue my readings I find that they frequently do not in narratives, particularly long, fluid, flowing narratives with a high level of closure and complex modification of topic, like Henry James or Edith Wharton.

Many aural constructions, by contrast, function on a kind of apposition. Cormac McCarthy would have some examples in print -- the predicates will hang because the subject, most often the focalizing character, has been previously described. Likewise one sometimes finds noun phrases with verbs implied or appositive to a prior sentence-object. This does something interesting with the articulation of that phrase itself. Because it's apparently detached from adjacent forms, it becomes more attached to the larger flow of language around it. The reader must take cues from the paragraphing or presumed content and make decisions about how the modification-subordinations would be grouped.

Kristeva has written something similar of Lous Ferdinand Celine's Castle to Castle -- a still better or at least more flagrant example, now that I think of it. Granted, most of these can be described more appropriately by using different punctuation, typically colons or dashes, which get underused in Celine and in naive writing as well, at least by academic standards. Celine uses elipses frequently, in his later works almost constantly, to punctuate his narrative. In that way he designates some kind of phrase boundaries without commiting himself to a certain set of grammatical relations between phrases.

Another example of a very different character would be the continuum of so-called dashes in Dickinson.

I want to see how this happens in ASL -- American Sign Language as used by the deaf -- specifically, what constitutes the end of a sentence, and to what extent it resembles writing and to what extent it resembles speech.