In a diverse signing community, it is not unusual to encounter a wide variety of expression in the types of signs used by different people. Perceptions of signing proficiency often vary within the community, however. Conventional wisdom intimates that those who learned at an early age at home or in school know true standard American Sign Language, while those who learned ASL later in life or use contact or coded signs are considered to be less skillful. Joseph Christopher Hill’s new study Language Attitudes in the American Deaf Community explores the linguistic and social factors that govern such stereotypical perceptions of social groups about signing differences.
Hill’s analysis focuses on affective, cognitive, and behavioral types of evaluative responses toward particular language varieties, such as ASL, contact signing, and Signed English. His work takes into account the perceptions of these signing types among the social groups of the American Deaf community that vary based on generation, age of acquisition, and race. He also gauges the effects of social information on these perceptions and the evaluations and descriptions of signing that results from their different concepts of a signing standard. Language Attitudes concludes that standard ASL’s value will continue to rise and the Deaf/Hearing cultural dichotomy will remain relevant without the occurrence of a dramatic cultural shift.
In Language in Hand: Why Sign Came Before Speech, William C. Stokoe begins his exploration of the origin of human language with a 2400-year-old quote by Democritus: “Everything existing in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity.” Stokoe capitalizes upon this simple credo in this far-ranging examination of the scholarly topography to support his formula for the development of language in humans: gesture-to-language-to-speech. Intrinsic to this is the proposition that speech is sufficient for language, but not necessary. Chance brought human ancestors down from the trees to the ground, freeing their hands for gesture, and then sign language, a progression that came from the necessity to communicate.
Stokoe recounts in Language in Hand how inspiration grew out of his original discovery in the 1950s and ’60s that deaf people who signed were using a true language with constructions that did not derive from spoken English. This erudite, highly engaging investigation calls upon decades of personal experience and published research to refute the recently entrenched principles that humans have a special, innate learning faculty for language and that speech equates with language. Integrating current findings in linguistics, semiotics, and anthropology, Stokoe fashions a closely-reasoned argument that suggests how our human ancestors’ powers of observation and natural hand movements could have evolved into signed morphemes.
Stokoe also proposes how the primarily gestural expression of language with vocal support shifted to primarily vocal language with gestural accompaniment. When describing this transition, however, he never loses sight of the significance of humans in the natural world and the role of environmental stimuli in the development of language. Stokoe illustrates this contention with fascinating observations of small, contemporary ethnic groups such as the Assiniboin Nakotas, a Native American group from Montana that intermingle their spoken and signed languages depending upon cultural imperatives.
Language in Hand also presents innovative thoughts on classifiers in American Sign Language and their similarity to certain spoken languages, convincing evidence that speech originally copied sign language forms before developing unrelated conventions through usage. Stokoe concludes with a hypothesis on how the acceptance of sign language as the first language of humans could revolutionize the education of infants, both deaf and hearing, who, like early humans, have the full capacity for language without speech.
This volume addresses the burgeoning need for language policy and language planning for the sign languages used by deaf people. Author Timothy Reagan writes for two audiences in his new book, those who know language policy and language planning but not the Deaf World, and those well-versed in the Deaf cultural community but unfamiliar with language planning studies. To begin, Chapter 1 presents an overview of the Deaf World and a brief introduction to sign language in general. The second chapter outlines a broad overview of language policy and language planning studies both as an academic discipline and an applied type of social engineering.
In Chapter 3, Reagan examines the specifics of American Sign Language in terms of the history of language policy and planning from the nineteenth century to the post-Congress of Milan period and its form in recent years. The fourth chapter critically examines the creation of manual codes used in deaf education in the U.S. and elsewhere. Chapter 5 analyzes language policy and planning in settings around the world, and the final chapter recommends steps and methods for future language policy and planning efforts for sign language. The cohesive rationale offered in Language Policy and Planning for Sign Languages will prove to be invaluable to all administrators and educators working with populations that use sign languages.
Laurent Clerc won lasting renown as the deaf teacher who helped Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet establish schools to educate deaf Americans in the 19th century. Now, his character as a young boy growing up in Paris has been captured in the novel Laurent Clerc.
In his own voice, Clerc vividly relates the experiences that led to his later progressive teaching methods. Especially influential was his long stay at the Royal National Institute for the Deaf in Paris, where he encountered sharply distinct personalities — the saintly, inspiring deaf teacher Massieu, the vicious Dr. Itard and his heartless “experiments” on deaf boys, and the “Father of the Deaf,” Abbe Sicard, who could hardly sign.
Young adult readers will find his story richly entertaining as well as informative.
Completely reorganized to reflect the growing intricacy of the study of ASL linguistics, the 5th edition presents 26 units in seven parts. Part One: Introduction presents a revision of Defining Language and an entirely new unit, Defining Linguistics. Part Two: Phonology has been completely updated with new terminology and examples. The third part, Morphology, features units on building new signs, deriving nouns from verbs, compounds, fingerspelling, and numeral incorporation. Part Four: Syntax includes units on basic sentence types, lexical categories, word order, time and aspect, verbs, and the function of space. The fifth part, Semantics, offers updates on the meanings of individual signs and sentences.
Part Six: Language in Use showcases an entirely new section on Black ASL in the unit on Variation and Historical Change. The units on bilingualism and language and ASL discourse have been thoroughly revised and updated, and the Language as Art unit has been enhanced with a new section on ASL in film. Two new readings update Part Seven, and all text illustrations have been replaced by video stills from the expanded video content. Also, signs described only with written explanations in past editions now have both photographic samples in the text and full demonstrations in the video.
You can find the supplemental video content on the Gallaudet University Press YouTube channel.
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