Sign Language Research: 1980 to Present

What Is Sign Language Research?

People who study languages (complex and rule-bound systems of parts that create meaning) are called linguists. Linguists are interested in understanding what can make up a language and how these building blocks are combined (and recombined) in order to create meaning. Linguists can study the phenomenon of language in different ways—phonetics/phonology, morphology, syntax, discourse, sociolinguistics, acquisition, and so on.

Across those different disciplines, the same theoretical frameworks can be used for different languages, even those with a different modality, namely sign. This is possible because spoken and signed languages, both being natural human languages, share many linguistic features. Sometimes, however, different approaches and tools are required for the examination of signed languages. And when different methodologies are applied, information is revealed about signed languages that may bear true for spoken languages as well.

Phonology

Phonology examines how words (spoken and signed) are created from meaningless parts. Phonologists are interested in examining these parts themselves and how they can be combined with other meaningless parts. After Stokoe’s seminal observation that the sign is made up of meaningless parts, the study of phonology for signed languages has been taken up by several linguists over the years. In the 1980s, there was a shift from viewing the sign as a simultaneous unit (the meaningless parts largely occur at the same time) to observing that the sign is actually a sequential creature; it has a beginning, middle, and end with unique features (hand configuration, placement, orientation, contact, path, nonmanuals, etc.) that are active and can change during each juncture. With this shift, linguists have tried to better understand the nature of the sign in which features may persist through the sign while others are dynamic. This has caused some linguists to declare that the sign is both simultaneous and sequential. Signed language phonologists work to create models that allow them to examine the phonology of signed languages.

One aspect of this work includes looking at how signs are actually produced in everyday use. These forms are usually not in citation form (what one could call the perfect incarnation of the sign, that is, what one would expect to see in a dictionary). Instead, these everyday forms are modified in different ways when coexisting with other signs in the everyday sign stream. Such change can be called coarticulation, which refers to the unpredictable ways in which neighboring parts of signs influence one another. But sometimes when change is [Page 837]predictable and is a part of a certain pattern, this is known as alternation. Along with understanding the phonological structure of the sign, signed language phonologists are interested in describing patterns of alternations (sometimes referred to as phonological processes).

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