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[Susan Hernandez]

--- Adrean Clark <creative at THETACTILEMIND.COM> wrote:
> 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}
> >


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