SASL Newsletter - Fall 2019 Issue Issue 15 - Fall 2019 | Page 5

A Note from the President
By Samuel J. Supalla
Yes, We Have a Problem...
"What problem?", you may ask. Let me explain about a misunderstanding in the field of
ASL/Deaf Studies that requires your attention. In SASL's most recent journal issue (Fall/Winter, 2018),
we reprinted five socially impactful papers from 1960 to 2009 concerning deaf people's language,
ASL. Scholars from across the country wrote commentaries on those papers. Dr. Richard Meier, who
heads the Linguistics Department at the University of Texas, wrote the afterword for this special issue.
He identified challenges for us when he wrote:
Here is the problem: Following Clayton Valli and his discussion of rhyme, we must define our
analytic vocabulary at an appropriate level of abstraction, one that allows us to identify genuine
similarities in the poetic traditions of signed and spoken languages. (p. 125)
Dr. Meier was referring to my commentary in the same SASLJ issue where I mention
vindicating ASL literature when a scholar challenged Valli's attempt to promote "a humanistic
viewpoint of deaf people as signers. Deaf people continue to have their own identity with an emphasis
on human qualities, including language" (Supalla, p. 65). I defended Valli's poetic and linguistic
analyses (including data) that support the existence of lines in ASL poetry, because through these
lines Valli could demonstrate rhyming in ASL. Yet the scholar who challenged Valli's work claims that
lines need to be dropped altogether and ASL poems should be described as poetic films. I cannot
accept this observation. The identification of ASL poems as films is insulting and insensitive when one
considers the socio-historical context of how deaf people have endured the suppression of their
language.
Dr. Meier's afterword walks a fine line. First of all, he recognized the importance of abstraction
in the use of our analytic vocabulary. For example, ASL may be visual, but its literary works should not
be mistermed as from the film medium. ASL literary works should be treated abstractly including
termed literary and poetic, equal to other human languages in general. Recall the linguistic principles
that William C. Stokoe identified for ASL back in 1960 that revolutionized how people think about
language in general (see his classic paper in SASLJ's special issue with Dr. Diane Lillo-Martin's
commentary), yet this linguistic discovery is somehow now being overlooked by terming an ASL poem
as film.
Dr. Meier went on to identify a problem in the field of ASL/Deaf Studies as follows:
...now an interesting problem for further research and discussion: Spoken languages are of
course not visual language (except in their written forms). In contrast, signed languages use a
visual medium to express visual concepts; do we see differences in the expression of visual
imagery in the two language modalities that may arise from the differing resources available to
signed and spoken languages? (p. 125-126)
Dr. Meier suggests that scholars are generally convinced that because ASL is visual, this may
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The Power of ASL
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Fall 2019 – Issue 15