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.