Directional Verbs

[Nassira Nicola]

On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 7:09 AM, Patricia Raswant <
patricia.raswant at gallaudet.edu> wrote:
I have a question.  Why do linguists compare ASL and other signed languages
to spoken languages?

---

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):

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.


Is an answer to the question you were asking?

Nassira




Nassira Nicola
University of Chicago
Department of Linguistics
http://home.uchicago.edu/~nnicola
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