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Many of us who have spent our careers investigating child language
development--in both speech and sign--don't buy into the innateness
hypothesis. Neither do most of the linguists I know around the
world. The obvious fact that language requires brain mechanisms
does not mean that the brain is pre-wired for language universals.
Everything we do, think, and feel is based on brain mechanisms, so you
can't get very far with that argument. And current cognitive
neurology hasn't found a "language center," but rather many
different interacting systems that are involved in language one way or
another.<br><br>
Much work in the fields of grammaticalization, functional linguistics,
cognitive linguistics, and typological linguistics has provided a deeper
understanding of the many cognitive, communicative, and social
interactional factors that, together, work to establish the forms and
functions of language. To be sure, there are linguistic
universals. And maybe, at the end of the day, some of them will
turn out to be irreducible to other explanatory factors. But first
we have to explore all factors that seem to be relevant for accounting
for the forms and functions of language--both those that are universal
and those that are not. The same sorts of factors work to determine
the forms and functions of both signed and spoken languages, with special
linguistic characteristics determined by the modality of
communication.<br><br>
Signed languages are "real" languages for the same reasons that
spoken languages are: duality of patterning, ability to create endless
new lexical items and meaningful utterances, semantic displacement,
encoding of propositions and a range of devices to modulate propositional
meanings, etc. etc. The linguistic investigation of signed
languages is important in linguistics generally, and it is developing
rapidly in many countries. Comparisons between languages is very
useful, and reveals ways in which groups of languages function in similar
ways. So, for example, it is insightful to compare ASL morphology
with the simultaneous morphology of Semitic languages like Arabic and
Hebrew. <br><br>
Sincerely,<br>
Dan Slobin, psycholinguist<br><br>
At 10:55 AM 3/27/2009, Nassira Nicola wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 7:09 AM,
Patricia Raswant
<<a href="mailto:patricia.raswant@gallaudet.edu">
patricia.raswant@gallaudet.edu</a>> wrote:<br>
I have a question. Why do linguists compare ASL and other signed
languages to spoken languages?<br><br>
---<br><br>
In addition to the other answers given, I'd offer the following (sorry if
it's review - I've been explaining this to my students all quarter, so
I'm just starting from the same amount of background that they
have):<br><br>
A great deal (not all, but a significant amount) of modern work in
linguistics in based on the assumption that language is at least partly
innate. Obviously, it's not *all* programmed into a baby's brain to
start with (the vocabulary of a specific language, for instance, is
definitely learned) but the idea is that babies figure out so much on
their own, without ever being exposed to it, that some fundamental parts
of language have to be based in the brain, somewhere.<br>
<br>
So, a lot of linguistics nowadays revolves around figuring out what
characteristics all languages share underneath the surface, so we can
then figure out what the brain's "language center"
contributes.<br><br>
What this means for signed languages is this: if all humans have
basically the same brain structure, and if the brain is what creates the
basic characteristics of language, then all languages should have the
same basic characteristics. If signed languages *don't* act like
every other human language, as other people have pointed out, then people
who believe in the innateness hypothesis start to get suspicious about
whether they actually *are* real languages.<br><br>
Plus, if you're committed to the idea that learning things about one
language can help explain another (because they come from the same
source, and resemble each other on some level), then it's important not
to ignore languages that might teach you something interesting.
Some of the work I've been doing on semantics in LSQ was inspired by work
my adviser did in Greek; I've had some great conversations with a
semanticist friend who works on French, helping her understand weird
things she's noticed in her work by comparing them to CL:55-> in ASL;
it's not unusual to draw (limited) comparisons between ASL noun/verb
pairs and certain structures in Hebrew and Arabic; etc. There's a
lot of useful work to be done in linguistics in general that signed
languages have a role in. <br><br>
Of course, if you're the type of linguist that works on how long a [b]
has to be voiced before it stops being perceived as a [p], well, signed
languages may not tell you much. But most linguistic questions end
up having very little to do with modality - language is language, mostly,
no matter what body parts you use to express it.<br><br>
<br>
Is an answer to the question you were asking?<br><br>
Nassira<br><br>
<br><br>
<br>
Nassira Nicola<br>
University of Chicago<br>
Department of Linguistics<br>
<a href="http://home.uchicago.edu/~nnicola">
http://home.uchicago.edu/~nnicola</a><br>
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<font size=1>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><br>
Dan I. Slobin, Professor of the Graduate School<br>
Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Linguistics<br><br>
Department of Psychology email:
slobin@berkeley.edu<br>
3210 Tolman
#1650
phone (Dept): 1-510-642-5292<br>
University of
California
phone (home): 1-510-848-1769<br>
Berkeley, CA 94720-1650
fax: 1-510-642-5293<br>
USA
<a href="http://ihd.berkeley.edu/Slobin.htm" eudora="autourl">
http://ihd.berkeley.edu/Slobin.htm<br>
</a>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><br>
<br>
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