By Samuel J. Supalla
Citation
Zeshan, U. (2002). Towards a notion of ‘word’ in sign languages. In R. Dixon & A. Aikhenvald (Eds.), Word:
A cross-linguistic typology (pp. 153-179). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Abstract
The question whether all languages have words may look like a nonsense question to many people, the
universal existence of words being regarded as a truism in itself. Even though it is widely acknowledged that
finding a strictly satisfying definition of ‘word’ is as difficult as defining similarly universal terms such as
‘sentence’ or ‘language’, the existence of words in all languages is not usually questioned. As with all
putative language universals, probing the validity of the claim depends crucially on looking at languages that
are as ‘different’ as possible. If many otherwise very ‘different’ languages share a certain feature, it is more
likely that this feature is a true universal than if only ‘similar’ languages are considered. The motivation for
looking at the concept of ‘word’ in sign languages lies exactly here: for what could be more ‘different’ than a
sign language? As Anderson (1982: 91) puts it: ‘Comparison of spoken and signed languages can be
especially valuable because the parallels are so surprising at first, and seem so automatic and natural after
we have worked with them. The challenge of finding these parallels produces important insights into the
nature of human language in general. So we can often learn more by studying a sign language than by
studying one more spoken language.’ This is of course not to ignore that modality-related differences
between signed and spoken language can be just as revealing as the parallels between the two.
(10 ¾ minutes long)
The Power of ASL
11
Summer 2018 – Issue 10