Word Order at the Workshop on Sign Linguistics, February 2004

[Allen Gardner]

Recent remarks to this list by Slobin, Wilbur, and Vermeerbergen
[attached] stress the subtleties and difficulties of studying
sign order or word order in any language, particularly in face to face
discourse.  How enhartening.  Does anyone here remember the extravagant
claims for word order in child speech that appeared in the early days
of the Chomskyite revolution.  The memory remains raw and poignant for
me because claims of virtually perfect word order in child speech were
the sole argument of most criticisms of our reports of chimpanzees
developing sign language.

The following by Roger Brown

    [1970, The first sentences of child and chimpanzee. R. Brown
    (Ed.), Selected Psycholinguistic Papers. New York: Macmillan]

was a distinguished, influential, and typical response of linguistic
commentators of the time.

    [referring to a personal communication proposing an empirical
    test, Brown responds]
      It is going to be interesting to learn the outcome of the
    Gardners' planned frequency comparisons.  It must be said,
    however that children show something much stronger than a
    statistical preference for correct order.  In the full data
    of Table 8-2 [samples of child discourse] violations of order
    are very uncommon; probably fewer than 100 violations in the
    thousands of utterances quoted.  It is definitely not the
    case that all possible orders of a combination typically
    occur; they practically never do. (p.227)

If we say that "thousands" should refer to a minimum of 2,000
observations, then Brown claimed here that toddlers make less than
half of one percent errors of word order.

At the time, Beatrix Gardner and I were sure that such extravagant and
obviously unverifiable claims would make laughing stocks of colleagues
who made them.  Obviously, they judged the audience much more astutely
than we.  Long ago the lack of something called "grammar" or "syntax"
in the early utterances of cross-fostered chimpanzees became the stock
textbook blurb on the topic.  Mentions of actual observations have
been very rare, discussions of evidence even more rare.

On the evidence of this list, however, sign language studies seem to
have matured to the point where they recognize profound difficulties
which must be overcome.  I cannot help hoping that some brave new
student will re-open the question of perfect "grammar" in human beings
and perfect absence of "grammar" in any nonhuman being.

Much more extensive studies of Washoe, as well as Moja, Pili, Tatu,
and Dar who were cross-fostered from birth have appeared since 1970.
I would be glad to furnish bibliographies and reprints

Allen Gardner
University of Nevada/296
Reno NV 89557
Voice 775-784-6828 ext 2024
Fax 775-784-1126
Email gardner at unr.edu

--------------------------

Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 09:21:55 -0700
From: "Dan I. Slobin" <slobin at socrates.Berkeley.EDU>
Subject: Re: Word Order at the Workshop on Sign Linguistics, February
2004

This is a great idea--but I'd be cautious about the role of word order
in signed languages--and in all languages where there is considerable
flexibility in word order for pragmatic purposes.  Decontextualized
picture descriptions are of limited use in studying this issue.  For
example, although SOV is the preferred order for such descriptions in
Turkish, less than half of utterances in discourse are SOV.  So it's
good that you include discourse studies as well.  But, in regard to
word order, most of the topics you suggest are not directly concerned
with word order--unless you mean also to include any ordering of
elements within constructions, in addition to the ordering of lexical
items in utterances.  I also find it strange that a proposal to
examine word oder makes no mention of subject/object, topic/comment,
focus, etc.  The proposal needs more clarity in defining a specific
topic that is precise enough to allow for comparable examination of
several sign languages.

Dan Slobin
University of California, Berkeley

--------------------

Date: Sun, 29 Jun 2003 17:20:03 -0500
To: "For the discussion of linguistics and signed languages."
From: Ronnie Wilbur <wilbur at omni.cc.purdue.edu>
Subject: Re: Word Order at the Workshop on Sign Linguistics, February
2004

I agree with Dan that it takes discourse studies as well as sentences,
but I think to truly understand a language's word order, it is also
necessary to understand (at minimum) the interaction with negation,
modals, previously established referents vs. out-of-the-blue
referents, verb agreement, possibly definiteness and/or animacy of
argument(s), and question formation. And that's without classifiers.

In addition, unless you know what is NOT grammatical, you can never be
really sure.

Ronnie B. Wilbur, Ph.D.
Professor and Chair, Linguistics
Purdue University

-------------------

Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2003 17:28:10 +0200
Subject: Word Order at the Workshop on Sign Linguistics,
         February 2004-second posting
From: Myriam Vermeerbergen <mvermeer at vub.ac.be>

Dear all,

First I would like to clarify something. Lorraine and I are not
organising a workshop (on word order or any other topic) ourselves.
Instead Pamela Perniss and Roland Pfau are organising the "Sign
Languages: A cross-linguistic perspective" workshop and Lorraine and I
would like to prepare a joint contribution on the topic of word order
for this workshop.

I too agree that word order is a very complex matter and that studying
it in depth means dealing with many many aspects, looking at it from
many different angles, taking into consideration a number of different
issues, etc. But I also think there is nothing wrong with looking at
the ordering of consituents in declarative sentences, at least as long
as you are aware of the fact that your results say something on the
word order in (a limited set of) declarative sentences in Sign
Language

And should not be seen as THE answer to the question "How does word
order in Sign Language A looks like." For me the analysis of
declarative sentences elicited by the use of Volterra's drawings was a
first, small step on a way to a better understanding of word order
issues in Flemish Sign Language. I am aware of the fact that it is a
long way...

Our idea to prepare a joint contribution on word order from a cross
linguistic perspective and take the study of declarative sentences in
different sign languages as a starting point comes from the
observation that a number of linguists studying different sign
languages have used the same drawings/test to elicit the same three
types of declarative sentences.  . . .

.. . .

Best,

Myriam Vermeerbergen