Double Articulation

[Adrean Clark]

I've been following this topic for a bit - fascinating discussion.

One question I have - when you refer to iconic signs, you refer to
signs that directly correspond to a "universal" picture, and when you
refer to arbitrary, it's signs that don't directly correspond to the
"universal" picture?

 From what I know ASL itself is a very arbitrary language.  Historically
sign languages were called the "natural language" - people believed it
was universal.

Correct me if I'm wrong - but If ASL was totally iconic, a total ASL
illiterate could walk in and start understanding everything.  But this
isn't the case - ASL is not iconic or a "mime" language.  It's
arbitrary.  Like "mother, mama" is nearly universal, but
"antidisestablishmentarianism" isn't.

Caswell's arguments seem to be a throwback to the oralism vs. manualism
era.  Both sides of the debate hurled arguments at each other - one of
them were that humans are not human unless they speak, another was that
sign preceded speech, and is universal.

Looks like we won't see the end of it, but we HAVE proven that SL is a
language in its own right.

Adrean

On Tuesday, May 13, 2003, at 08:47 AM, Dan Parvaz wrote:

> Quite aside from Ms. Caswell's ravings, the discussion of double
> articulation is useful, as can be seen from Adam Schembri and Scott
> Liddell's postings to the list. A good introduction to double
> articulation
> as used in semiotics can be found here:
>
> http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem08a.html
>
> It isn't Oxbridge (it isn't even Yalevard), but it'll have to do. :-)
>
> The question on duality of patterning is an interesting one. When I
> teach
> this to undergraduates, the usual strategy is to trot out three English
> phonemes -- /t/, /a/, and /p/, to pull some out of a hat -- and show
> that
> "pot," "opt," and "top" can be formed. Once we leave that level, we are
> constrained by what the words mean; reordering the morphemes in a word
> or
> the words in a sentence may be permissible or not, and may change the
> meaning or not, but no one would argue that it is the same as
> re-ordering
> the segments in a word, beyond some rather superficial formal sense.
> Duality of patterning then, happens somewhere at or below the level of
> a
> word/morpheme.
>
> On to signed languages. In many signed languages, GIVE has some sort of
> agreement (not that we would all call it that, but if I could count on
> your charity for a moment) between Agent and Beneficiary. Re-ordering
> the
> time slots, which in some models requires reversing the direction of
> the
> movement, can produce a different well-formed sign.  However, there are
> questions about how much of this is really reordering?  If you change
> the
> movement, you have a different "segment" if that's what you want to
> call
> it. Furthermore, even if this were a strict permutation (no
> substitutions!) then the change in the sign is based on the underlying
> semantics of the locations.
>
> So duality of patterning in a signed language cannot rest on the kind
> of
> permutability arguments that we are used to using. We can talk about
> signs
> having some kind of arbitariness without sacrificing their iconicity,
> but
> I'm not convinced that that's the same thing.
>
> Any takers? I know Sherman has thought long and hard about this, and I
> know he isn't the only one.
>
> ____________
> DAN PARVAZ
> Computational Linguist, CSI, Inc.
> PhD student, University of New Mexico
> dparvaz@{mac.com,csi-inc.com,unm.edu}
>