International Day of Sign Languages

  It has been some forty years since serious investigation of natural sign languages began to show that these languages are bona fide linguistic systems , with structures and rules and the full range of expressive power that characterize spoken languages. Researchers have spent most of that time demonstrating, with increasing rigor and formality, the sometimes surprising similarities between languages in the two modalities, spoken and signed. Concomitantly, scholars in the related disciplines of language acquisition and neurolinguistics have been discovering significant similarities between spoken and signed languages in these domains as well. It is safe to say that the academic world is now convinced that sign languages are real languages in every sense of the term . If this were the whole story, however, there would be no need for a chapter on sign languages in this volume. Each sign language would be seen as a language like any other, English, Hungarian, Central Alaskan Yu...

  We begin by offering a sketch of the evidence that sign languages have grammatical structures comparable to those of spoken languages. First we examine the structure of the sentence (syntax) , and then we move to the structure of the smaller units of language , those that may be compared to the meaningless but identifiable sounds of speech (phonology) . We will end this section with a discussion of the structure of words (morphology) .

  In order to have sentences, one must have words, and words – at least in spoken language – are pronounced as a series of sounds. What about the sign of sign language? Does it have a level of substructure like the spoken word? Since spoken and signed languages are produced and perceived by different physical systems – oral / aural, and manual / visual – one might expect to find the least amount of similarity across the two modalities at this level of analysis. Yet, here, too, there is much common ground. In 1960, William Stokoe published a monograph in which he demonstrated that the words of American Sign Language are not holistic gestures, but, rather, are analyzable as a combination of three meaningless yet linguistically significant categories: handshapes, locations, and movements. That is, by changing some feature of any one of those three categories, themselves meaningless, one could change the meaning of the sign . For example, by changing only the configuration of the ha...

What is language, and how is it structured?  • Language - a system for combining symbols (such as words) so that an unlimited number of meaningful statements can be made for the purpose of communicating with others.   • Grammar - the system of rules governing the structure and use a of language. • Syntax - the system of rules for combining words and phrases to form grammatically correct sentences.  • Morphemes - the smallest units of meaning within a language. – Semantics - the rules for determining the meaning of words and sentences. • Phonemes - the basic units of sound in language.  • Pragmatics - aspects of language involving the practical ways of communicating with others, or the social “niceties” of language How are language and thought related?  Language and Cognition  • Cognitive universalism – theory that concepts are universal and influence the development of language.  • Jean Piaget believed that concepts precede and aid the developm...