Mark Mandel's dissertation on American Sign Language

[Mark A Mandel]

#----- Original Message -----
        [Gerald Cohen <gcohen at UMR.EDU>]
#>    Maybe Mark Mandel might be willing to tell us a bit about his
#> dissertation: why he selected the ASL topic,  the main contributions
#> of his research, any particularly interesting stories connected with
#> this research project, and anything else he thinks should be known
#> about his work. Or any part of the preceding items.

On Fri, 7 Feb 2003, George Thompson wrote:

#Dr. Mandel's dissertation, PHONOTACTICS AND MORPHOPHONOLOGY IN
#AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE, is available at better libraries everywhere,
#which, at the moment, among the libraries in the RLIN network,
#includes only the library at UC Berkeley, where it was done.
#Scandalously, it is not in the collection of the Bobst Library, which
#in so many other respects has proven to be the benchmark for
#institutions aspiring to rank among better libraries.  I am requesting
#a copy this morning.  Mark, your royalty check from UMI will soon be
#in the mail.

Sir, you do me honor!

I started at UC Berkeley in the linguistics grad program in 1984 --
well, actually in 1983 as an auditor. That excellent program, under Karl
Zimmer's chairmanship, gave me a solid foundation in phonetics and
phonology with John Ohala, historical and comparative linguistics with
Madison Beeler and Mary Haas, field methods with Jim Matisoff, and
contemporary theoretical linguistics with Robin Lakoff, George Lakoff,
and Chuck Fillmore -- and much more, with these and many others whom I
in no way mean to slight by my omission in this note.

I was developing a concentration in generative semantics when, in the
break between the fall and winter trimesters in 1985 or '86, I saw a
note on the graduate lx office bulletin board. Lynn Friedman, an
advanced graduate student, was organizing a seminar in the linguistics
of American Sign Language for the coming term. It was like fireworks and
explosions to me: "My God, there's this whole universe of language out
there that I haven't been aware of!" I signed up, and my direction was
set.

Along with our studies and our work with our main informant, whose full
name (unlike his face) I am embarrassed to be unable to recall -- Tom
something --, I enrolled as a student in evening sign language classes
and as a volunteer with DCARA, the Deaf Counseling And Resource Agency
in Oakland, and took a summer course at Cal State Northridge (CSUN).

I got interested in ASL phonology and what physical forces might be
behind it. I audited a trimester of human anatomy, the term
concentrating on the forelimb, and I developed an ASCII transcription of
William Stokoe's ASL notation and typed up his dictionary online at the
computer center so I could search for various combinations of
handshapes, locations, movements, and orientations -- the classes of
phonemes in ASL, *very* roughly analogous to consonants and vowels. (I'm
leaving out a lot.) I never did publish that transcription formally, but
it's available on line at http://world.std.com/~mam/ASL.html , and a few
other people have used it.

I chose as my proposal title "Phonotactics and Morphophonology of
American Sign Language", and the damn thing grew and grew. A dear friend
and mentor, who had been my high school senior-year English teacher,
advised me that "a dissertation is never completed, only abandoned", and
at some point I petitioned my committee to let me change "of" to "in",
which brought its scope down to a humanly achievable size. Even so, it's
(iirc) closer to 300 pages than 200, a good piece of which is
illustrations and diagrams, most of them swiped (with credit) from SL
research publications and Gray's _Anatomy_. Much of it consists of
observations on patterns in ASL and (again, iirc) previously unnoticed
links between various phonemes, as indicated by statistical patterns in
the lexicon and with possible bases in physiology: what muscles are
attached to what others, which digits have extensor and flexor muscles
of their own, and so on.

At a sign language conference in San Diego I ran into Harlan Lane, who
asked me what I was planning to do once I got my doctorate. I had no
very good idea, and he invited me to apply for a postdoc at
Northeastern, where he was chairman of the Psychology Department, which
housed their ASL studies. I applied for and won an NEH 2-year postdoc.
But the dissertation still wasn't done. The department's procedure at
that time was that a student defended his proposal, but did not have to
defend the dissertation itself, just complete it to the committee's
satisfaction and signatures.  So in the fall of 1980 I drove across
country to Boston with my wife and our four-year-old daughter. I
finished it up writing at nights and on weekends, and typing it up with
my wife's help and our daughter's very great patience in the department
office, and submitted it by mail with the committee's approval in,
getting my doctorate in, I think, February of 1981.

The subject of the postdoc was Anatomical Constraints on Sign Language
Phonology. I took an NU course in kinesiology, the study of body
movement, and looked into the physics of body movement, including how
some patterns of movement seem to be constrained by the effects of
Newton's Third Law (reaction). I think I got some papers from that, but
I never did get a proper amount of research and publishable results from
the measurements I had planned to do.

In 1983, when the postdoc ended, the bottom had dropped out of the
market for linguists, and after a brief stint as a lab programmer I
wound up as a software engineer at Honeywell, doing linguistics only on
my own and staying in touch with the field mostly through the Internet.
In 1990 that company was in bad shape and I was among thousands laid
off. Through a friend, I heard of Dragon Systems, a pioneering speech
recognition company which was about to release its first end-user
product and had just signed a contract for ASR in, I think, German and
French, and which needed a linguist. I was their company linguist
through the nineties and through the purchase by Lernout & Hauspie, and
on to the bitter end when the house (of cards) that Jo Lernout and Pol
Hauspie built came tumbling down.

Last June I attended the Eighth Conference on Laboratory Phonology at
Yale, interesting to me by itself and all the more so on account of a
track on sign linguistics. I was delighted to be among sign linguists
again, and more than somewhat astonished that they had not only heard of
me but were still using my work. I tell you, friends, that's a real
rush.

There I also ran into Mark Liberman of the University of Pennsylvania,
whom I knew from being Dragon's liaison with the Linguistic Data
Consortium. And now I am research administrator for a longterm project
at UPenn on Information Extraction from the Biomedical Literature. If
you want to see what I am doing now, you can look me up at
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~mamandel/ .

-- And that is what I *should* be doing right now, even though the
University is closed today on account of the snow. I was looking forward
to a colloquium at noon in this very office, by Ann Senghas on "From
Gestures to Grammar: How Children are Creating Nicaraguan Sign
Language", a topic that my UCB classmate Judy Kegl has been intimately
involved with for most of her career; but that's off too. So I will
close this note and get back to work. Thank you for asking.

-- Mark A. Mandel
   Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania