SV: [SLLING-L] Importance of SL phonemes

[Sonja Erlenkamp]

I totally agree with you. What we need is exactly a "theoretical heavy lifting" and I am optimistic that it will show up, may be it is already happening. The past couple of years I have met some "out of the box thinkers" doing research on signed languages and may be one (or all) of them might come up with the lift we need. I am just hoping that we are ready to take up whatever ball they throw at us and at least take a proper look at it and not just "jump out of the way" because we're afraid to get hit by some new and frightening ideas. ;)
I think we all agree on that iconicity is an important part of signed languages, on the level of single signs as well as in larger structures. In the past 10 years several analyses have shown that it contributes to meaning construction on a large scale. Spoken language descriptions cannot provide us with answers how iconic mechanisms exactly work, because they do not have all these mechanisms (only some of them). I am afraid we have to come up with a model on iconicity ourselves and I know that there are several in the making. :)

All the best

Sonja

-----Opprinnelig melding-----
Fra: slling-l-bounces at majordomo.valenciacc.edu [mailto:slling-l-bounces at majordomo.valenciacc.edu] På vegne av Dan Parvaz
Sendt: 1. oktober 2007 14:25
Til: A list for linguists interested in signed languages
Emne: Re: [SLLING-L] Importance of SL phonemes

> As for the officials: I think it is enough to tell them that scientifically spoken are signed
> languages naturally developed, fully grammaticalized languages that - as all other natural
> languages - are part of the cultural and individual identify of their users.

Sounds fine to me. However, if we are going to take the term
"grammaticalized" seriously, then we are obligated to say exactly
*what* kind of order emerges from the process. Does the resulting
system only go down to the morphological level? Even if a phonemic
analysis is hopelessly leaky, does it hold enough water to make
writing possible? I'm thinking of Lindblom et al's work on
self-organization in phonetic inventories. Something constrains, for
instance, handshape inventory... what combination of innate form
("nature") and usage ("nuture") gives us the best model?

BTW, please note that I'm asking these as real, not rhetorical
questions. I'm not married to any particular analysis.

By the same token, what does a term like "iconeme" buy us? Without
doing the necessary theoretical heavy lifting, all this does is put
the problem off. The semantic end of any symbol system -- iconic or
otherwise -- exists in the minds of the user community. We're still
left having to explain why this configuration of parameters and not
some other, equally iconic, arrangement are what obtains in a given
SL.

Cheers,

-Dan.
_______________________________________________
SLLING-L mailing list
SLLING-L at majordomo.valenciacc.edu
http://majordomo.valenciacc.edu/mailman/listinfo/slling-l


_______________________________________________
SLLING-L mailing list
SLLING-L at majordomo.valenciacc.edu
http://majordomo.valenciacc.edu/mailman/listinfo/slling-l