Blackwell Reference Online

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After one of the Bampton lectures at Columbia in 1986, a young member of the audience approached him [Zelling Harris] and asked what he would take up if he had another lifetime before him. He mentioned poetry, especially the longer works of the 19th century poets like Browning. He mentioned music. And he mentioned sign language. –Bruce Nevin, “A Tribute to Zelling Harris” Linguists have been drawn to the study of signed languages for about 35 years because of the challenges they pose to our theoretical tools as we attempt to deal with a natural language that uses vision rather than audition. It is important to consider what the state of our knowledge about American Sign Language (ASL) is, since signed languages also offer unique opportunities for testing ideas about the nature of language itself, ideas generally formulated exclusively from observations about spoken language. Our task as ASL phonologists is to ascertain which are the minimal units of the system, which aspects of this signal are contrastive, and how these units are constrained by the sensory systems that produce and perceive them. Of all the items on the list of differences and similarities between signed and spoken languages, the areas that present the most striking divergences occur in morphophonemics and phonology. I use the term “morphophonemics” here, because there is nothing strikingly different about the types ... log in or subscribe to read full text