Sign Language Structure
Stokoe, Jr.
itself is used response-wise, so that it has not the linguistic status of the head-eye dip; but its
physical structure keeps it much closer to the visual linguistic activity than kinestic activity is to
speech. However, considered by itself this level of visual behavior would seem to be very like
kinesics in structure and ‘meaning’, as it is perhaps the closest communication link between the
deaf and the hearing.
This part of the communication of the deaf, that is both the dip and the smile kind of
activity, needs much more investigation; for it is the key to syntactical structure. Moreover, it is
perhaps a very large part of what the earlier students termed ‘the natural sign language’. Thomas
Hopkins Gallaudet (Annals, 1847) writes of an experiment in this vein. Without using hands at all
he ‘signed’ a story to a class in The American School. One way suppose that this successful
communication is the close counterpart of the game that the linguistically curious play by applying
stress, pitch, and juncture to a continuous and unvarying vocalization, a hum say, even carrying
on fairly intelligible conversations in this way.
3.4. Having found that some of this visible activity has patterned syntactical uses, the writer
looked back over much of the data and in retrospect reexamined many remembered sign language
utterances. Many questions besides ‘Remember?’ were signed simply by the ‘questioning look’
with a sign. Another way of asking a question also appears, which is more formal and less frequent;
that is ‘making a question mark’: the index hand draws the shape of the punctuation mark, or the
finger crooks and straightens with a thrust, G (?) , or, G # . This question mark sign permits an
English question sentence order, and indeed that order and sign are most often observed in
simultaneous English-Sign use, especially in lecture or faculty meeting situations. The facially
signaled question will often have a genuine sign language word order.
For example an informant on film signs:
mF × > × f-o-r-d lM #^ AA r~
Word-for-sign this is
‘pontiac’ ‘ford’ ‘better’ ‘which’.
He makes it a question by the ‘look’ that means question to anyone in our culture. If we show that
look symbolically by 2, the sign sentence may be written:
mF × > × f-o-r-d lM #^ AA r~ 2
and translated now:
Which do you like better, Pontiac or Ford?
The translation is still approximate because one cannot be sure whether ‘like better’ and ‘be better’
are distinct in this teen-age signer’s thinking.
The same kind of checking for patterned occurrences of the eye-head dip shows that it not
only marks a response as in the ‘remember’ use but also serves as a much more frequent way to
SASLJ, Vol. 2, No. 2 – Fall/Winter 2018
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