Roots of language
I am currently involved in a project studying a new sign language used by a community of hearing and deaf Bedouins in southern Israel. Together with Mark Aronoff, Irit Meir and Wendy Sandler, we have been investigating the emergence of language structure in a sign language that was created in a closed community approximately 70 years ago. We have discovered consistent word order appearing by the second-generation of signers, and an emerging classification of verbs which appears to differ from that found in older sign languages. Our goal is to uncover the roots of language through the study of a language emerging “in the wild,” or one which develops naturally within a community.
Language and culture
Natural sign languages have as their distinguishing feature histories within communities of people. The history of ASL dates from the earliest years of colonial America. With Tom Humphries, I have published two books on the cultures and communities of Deaf people in the U.S.: Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture (Harvard University Press, 1988) and Inside Deaf Culture (Harvard University Press, 2005). I view culture as a process, made up of practices carried out in different contexts. These practices are in part historically created “solutions” to being deaf in the U.S, including living among hearing people. ASL is one such “solution,” the creation of a visual/manual language which is adaptive to the communicative and symbolic needs of a community of deaf people. Among the topics I have written include: performance in ASL, rhetoric in George William Veditz’s 1913 film, The Preservation of the Sign Language, and the future of sign languages in the age of cochlear implants and genetic engineering.
Sign language structure
My dissertation, “Interaction of Morphology and Syntax in American Sign Language” (1983) was later published as an Outstanding Dissertation in Linguistics (Garland Press, 1988). This work analyzed ASL verbs as dividing into three major classes, a pattern that has since been observed in a number of other sign languages around the world: first, plain verbs (those without agreement), spatial verbs (those marking locatives) and then, inflecting verbs (those with agreement). A recent re-analysis of verbs has focused on how the three classes balance competing iconicities within a sign language system. Other work on ASL structure include ASL phonology and the study of complex discourse forms in ASL.
