Afterword
Meier
Afterword
Richard P. Meier
The University of Texas at Austin
Different scholars have differing motivations for studying ASL; those motivations
may of course change over the course of a career or even from one project to the next.
Some researchers are interested in big scientific questions about the nature of human
language. To what extent do the structures of signed and spoken languages differ because
of the different transmission channels in which they are produced and perceived? Are
signed and spoken languages—despite obvious differences in articulatory and perceptual
apparatus—acquired on similar developmental schedules by young children? Is the
processing of signed and spoken languages largely localized in the same or different
regions of the human brain? Researchers with these kinds of questions in mind may seek
to test broad hypotheses about the nature of the human language capacity. Those
hypotheses may not address ASL in particular, but rather signed languages in general.
Other researchers, researchers with perhaps a more humanistic focus, are interested
in ASL in specific. How does ASL compare to the many other signed languages used
around the world? What is the history of this signed language and how have signs changed
over that history? How does ASL vary within and across different communities in the
United States and Canada? What are the aesthetic traditions of the verbal arts—the
linguistic arts of poetry and storytelling and sign play—within the American Deaf
community? These are all important issues for scholarship on ASL.
Still other researchers, some with an activist bent, may seek social justice for the
signing community; in his introduction to this issue, Jody Cripps emphasizes the social
impact of the collected papers. There are threats to the future of ASL and other signed
languages. How do we perpetuate ASL and its community of signers? What are the
language rights of signers of ASL? How do we fortify the smaller, often younger, signed
languages that we find around the world against the very immediate threats that such
languages may face? How do we ensure that deaf children—especially deaf children of
hearing parents—have access to ASL? What are appropriate school environments for deaf
children?
Stokoe had broad issues in mind in his 1960 paper: in the first sentence (Section 0,
p. 11 in this issue), he says that his primary purpose “is to bring within the purview of
linguistics a virtually unknown language, the sign language of the American deaf.”
Although he makes little mention of signed languages other than ASL, it is clear that his
ambitions extend beyond ASL. He is concerned for example with “the origin and
development of the gesture language of the congenitally deaf individual in any society….”
He refers in passing to language evolution, which would be a continuing interest (e.g.,
Armstrong, Stokoe, & Wilcox, 1995).
The Year 1960 in Linguistics
1960 was—we know—the year in which Stokoe published his first analyses of
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