One of the reasons that I included a section on Sign Language in this course was to draw your attention to the fact that a language does not have to be "spoken" in order to qualify as a natural human language. In fact, many people (both academics and non-academics) assume that speech and language are terms that can be used interchangeably. But this is not actually the case. What's important to bear in mind is that language is, as your book Language Files  notes, "an abstract cognitive system". By contrast, speech is an action. Speech is the way that most human languages are conveyed. The technical term that we use to characterize this is that we say that speech is a modality. So, human languages have at least two modalities.

• Spoken languages are conveyed through speech (and perceived primarily, though not entirely, through the ear).
• Signed languages are conveyed manually through the use of gesture, and they are perceived visually.

A persistent source of misunderstanding regarding signed languages is that many people think that they are a kind of pantomime. Part of this misconception comes from the fact that the signs that are employed in signed languages are assumed to be iconic, i.e. people assume that the signs look like the objects in the world that they represent. In fact, it is this apparent iconicity that has led people to draw various erroneous conclusions about signed languages. Two of these misconceptions are noted here.

• Misconception 1: Signed languages are a kind of sublanguage or pantomime, due to the iconicity of the signs used. Thus, signers from all over the world can understand each other; that is, signed languages are universally understandable.

• Misconception 2: Signed languages, as pantomime, amount to drawing pictures in the air. They are different from "real" spoken languages because they lack the grammatical regularity and complexity that spoken languages have.

We can argue against both of these pretty easily. Let's take misconception 1 for starters. What predictions would misconception 1 make? For one thing, misconception 1 predicts that signers from all over the world should be able to communicate easily with one another. This is, of course, not true. Sign languages from around the world are not mutually intelligible. So, we have one piece of evidence against misconception 1. Point two: misconception 1 also predicts that sign languages should have few if any words for abstract concepts, since these are often difficult to express iconically. Again, this is not true. Sign languages have signs for concepts and ideas, just as spoken languages do. Check out the ASL dictionary that you can link to from the same page where our lecture notes are posted.. It doesn't represent anywhere near the set of signs that exist in ASL, but it gives you a nice idea of how ASL signs express the same range of concepts that spoken language words do. Finally, a third point that is important to note is that if misconception also predicts that NON-signers should have a pretty easy time understanding sign. Why do I say this? Well, if signs are simply iconic, then it should be easy to understand signers when they are using them. Clearly, this is not the case. Remember how I came into class and signed a bit for you all. I bet that you had no idea what I was saying (for those of you who had never had any exposure to sign language, of course).

So, we've just smashed misconception 1. It is useful to bear in mind, however, that the reason people have this misconception is that there is some degree of iconicity in signed languages. This makes some sense, of course, since signing is a manual modality that is perceived through the eyes. Think about it. If you were going to make a sign for something, especially something concrete, you'd probably invent a sign that is somewhat iconic. When discussing iconicity, linguists distinguish between three levels or degrees. That is, we classify the relative iconicity of signs along the following lines:

Transparent.We use the term transparent to refer to a sign that is highly iconic. Basically, we say that a sign is transparent if it is easily understood by the untrained observer. I gave you the example of the ASL sign for 'house' in class as an example.

Translucent. This next degree of iconicity. The idea here is that some signs are not easily understood at first glance, but then, upon being told what the sign means, the observer makes a connection between the meaning and the sign. That is, the observer gets a sense of the sign's iconicity only after knowing the sign. I gave you the example of the ASL sign for 'cat' as one such potential example. Clearly, the sign for 'cat' was more iconic for some of you than for others. But, in general, it is the case that we all share the impression that the sign for 'house' is more iconic.

Opaque. We say that a sign is opaque if it has no recognizable relationship to its meaning. So, I gave you the example of the sign for 'country'. The deal here is that even after I told you what the sign meant, you weren't able to make a connection between the sign and the meaning. The sign did not appear to have any degree of iconicity.

1) In a way, it's really not a big deal that signs are somewhat iconic. As I note above, the fact that signs are conveyed visually allows for a greater amount of visual connection between signs and the things they represent. In speech, in fact, there is also iconicity in the form of onomatopoeia, which refers to a when sounds "sound like" the things that they represent. In English, for example, we use the [i] sound often to convey the meaning of smallness, as in "teeny" and "wee" and "petite", as well as in the diminutive that we might use for names, like "Christie" or "Katie" or "Bobby" and so forth. Words that start with [fl] often convey a meaning relating to quickness or lightness, as in 'flick' and 'flutter' and 'flash' and 'float' and 'fly' and on and on. This is also a kind of iconicity. The problem is that the more visible nature of the iconicity of sign language has led people to draw the erroneous conclusion that signed languages are not "real" languages, and that's why we strive to show that signed languages aren't iconic in the way that many people have assumed.

2) It is also important to note that even things that appear to be obviously iconic are not universally iconic. The obvious iconicity of the ASL word for 'house' is only obvious in a culture where houses are prototypically shaped like rectangles with pitched roofs. If we are talking to someone from a culture in which houses are rounded huts, then the sign for 'house' in ASL might well be a bit opaque. In the case of onomatopoeia, a similar thing is also true. That is, the onomatopoetic nature of sounds is often particular to a given language or set of related languages.

3) Finally, even in the case of highly iconic (i.e. transparently iconic) signs in ASL, there is a historical tendency for signs to lose their iconicity over time. Thus, things which start out as very iconic become less so for successive generations of signers, making signs as arbitrary in many cases for their users as spoken words are for speakers of languages such as English.

Arguments against misconception 2

At the root of misconception 2 is the erroneous claim that signing is merely a kind of picture drawing in the air. To show that this is simply not the case, we want to show that sign languages have a complex grammar just like any other spoken language. We'll review here some things that we pointed out in class to make this point. Specifically, we'll show that sign languages have complex morphology and syntax and, yes, even "phonology". In other words, they have all the grammatical modules that we'd expect to find in any human language. Here, I'm going to just touch briefly on each area below.

Phonology and Signed languages

Many people are surprised to hear linguists talk about the "phonetics" and "phonology" of signed languages. Since these languages use a visual and not a spoken modality, there is the intuitively obvious fact that sign languages don't use sound to convey information and so we might be led to conclude that phonology and phonetics are irrelevant to signed languages. But, if we think about phonology and phonetics a bit more abstractly, this is not so obviously true anymore. We might think of phonology instead as an abstract component within our overall grammar that is responsible for organizing the system of production, i.e. of articulation, regardless of whether articulation is carried out with the hands or through speaking. In this sense, we can show clearly that signed languages have a phonology that is in many respects the same as spoken languages. A case in point is a consideration of how we can break signs down into smaller units, very much like we can break phonemes down into smaller articulatory features or properties.

Let's look at this idea a bit more in detail. As I mentioned in class, the linguist William Stokoe, who was a professor at Gallaudet University in Washington, was really the first person to systematically argue that signed languages had all the properties of spoken languages. One very important area of his research involved breaking signs down into smaller components, thus showing that signs were built up out of smaller parts, just like phonemes are made up out of smaller phonetic features, and just like morphemes in spoken languages are made up out of phonemes. This, of course, bears on the issue of human language grammars working by building elements by combining smaller discrete elements--a point which Pinker discusses at length throughout The Language Instinct.

In particular, Stokoe working to develop a phonetic transcription system for signs, originally identified THREE parameters or formational elements that signs are comprised of. If it helps, you can compare these to features like the voicing, place, and manner features that we have shown sounds to be comprised of. Here's a list of Stokoe's original three parameters:

In fact, we can see that these parameters can function just like phonetic features in marking meaning between otherwise identical signs. That is, we can find minimal pairs of signs. I gave you three examples in class, taken from Language Files:

• 1) the difference between "apple" and "candy" is signaled by using two different handshapes at the same location and with the same movement
• 2) the difference between "apple" and "onion" is signaled by making the same handshape and movement, but by locating the sign at the mouth for "apple" and at the eye for "onion"
• 3) the difference between "think" and "wonder" is signaled by using the same place of articulation (the temple) and the same handshape (a pointed index finger), but the movement is different. Wonder involves a circle movement, while "think" does not involve moving the hand in a circle.

Morphology and Syntax

Similarly, signed languages such as ASL have morphological and syntactic grammars, just like spoken languages do. Again, a detailed account of how, say, ASL syntax and morphology are structured is beyond the scope of this review. But, let's highlight a couple of points.

One of the most interesting aspects of ASL morphology is the use of what are called directional verbs. Directional verbs are cool because signers are able to express the direction of an activity at the same time as they use the sign indicating the action. An example is the word 'give', which is made by shaping the hand with the palm up and the thumb pressed into the four fingers. You can see a picture on p. 434 of Language Files, or, better yet, go to the on-line ASL dictionary. Anyway, directionality is expressed via movement of the hand. So, if A gives something to B, the sign moves from A to B in the sign space being used in the discourse. If B gives something to A, then the movement is in the other direction. In a way, what you can see is that this is very similar to processes of affixation in spoken languages. In sign, what's cool is that the affix doesn't get stuck on the beginning or end of the morpheme to which it is attached. Instead, it can be realized simultaneously.

Directional verbs aren't the only kind of morphological process in ASL. One other interesting one that I told you about in class is reduplication. We learned about this concept when we studied morphology but didn't consider how reduplication might work in a signed language. In ASL, signs can be reduplicated by being repeated. The effect of reduplication in ASL is to turn some verbs into nouns. (Check out the signs for 'sit' and 'chair' in the on-line ASL dictionary.)So, in technical terms, reduplication is used for what we call nominalization or noun making. Not all verbs can be nominalized in ASL, but this isn't surprising or shouldn't be. Think about our discussion of English morphology. We can't stick the suffix -hood on any noun to make it a property. So, parent-hood is fine, but pig-hood is not great, and sand-hood is pretty awful.

As for the syntax of ASL (which I've used here throughout since I don't know much about other sign languages), what I want you to take away at this point are two things:

• 1) there is a rich syntax with regular "rules" of phrase structure
• 2) ASL syntax is NOT simply a matter of making the signs for English words and putting those signs in the order that English words would be put in.

Remember in class how I signed to you "hi, my name is Chip. Today 's topic is Sign Language or ASL." If were were to translate that literally, i.e. gloss it sign by sign, we'd get something like this: "hi, my name C-H-I-P. now day topic what? sign or A-S-L." Immediately, we see that although the "meaning" is the same and although each version feels just as natural to native speakers of English and ASL respectively, they have clear differences in word order. The reason that I stress this is that many people assume that ASL is just English but with manual signs instead of spoken words. Nothing could be further from the truth. Sure, ASL has influences from English because the two languages are in close contact, BUT ASL is a distinct language with its own particular phonological, morphological, and syntactic systems.

Final Notes on ASL (and by extension signed languages)

The big picture is that signed languages are natural human languages with the same types of properties that we find in all other languages in the world. As a final note, we also find historical changes and dialectal variation just like we do with spoken languages. Your text reviews these on pp. 435-437. A couple of points are worth highlighting. First, ASL has shown a couple of general historical trends. One has been the reduction of the signing space, a kind of centralization. Signs that used to be realized more peripherally have drifted closer to the area in front of the body. At the same time, a number of signs that used one hand on the periphery of the sign space now use two. A case in point is the sign for "die" or "dead" which is pictured in your book. Language Files also mentions the simplification of some signs that formerly used two hands on the head and now use only one. What's the point. Just this. In the same way that sound changes, or morphological or syntactic changes occur over time in spoken languages, the same types of changes happen in signed languages. On the same note, your book points out that ASL has dialectal variation. The most obvious cases are those that involve the use of different signs in different parts of the country. Look at the Ohio sign for 'football' as opposed to the standard or more widespread sign. I've  also seen some articles which mentioned dialectal variation among African American deaf ASL speakers and non-African Americans. This shouldn't surprise us if we think of ASL as a language. It should exhibit all of the properties that other languages do. (For those interested, here's a link to a new book on sociolinguistics in the Deaf community.)

Finally finally...some people have said that ASL isn't a language because it doesn't have its own writing system. To this, I hope we are all ready to say "NONSENSE". By this definition, most of the human languages ever spoken aren't languages, since the majority of languages that have ever existed haven't had writing systems. In fact, the logic of assuming that writing must be equated with language is strange. Would you say that a person doesn't know a language if they can't write it, even if they have grown up speaking the language and use it every day? Writing (and reading) are interesting subjects for careful study, but we shouldn't equate writing with speaking (or signing), and we shouldn't assume that a language isn't a language because it doesn't have a writing system. Be sure to supplement this part of the study guide with the handout that I gave you in class. Here's a possible question to think about? How can we compare the use of facial expressions in ASL to intonation in English?