Cover next page > title: Seeing Language in Sign : The Work of William C. Stokoe author
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| < previous page page_117 next page > If you like this book, buy it! < previous page page_118 next page > Page come straight from working on other sign language projects in California. We had a large open office, as I recall, and we spent the whole first week sitting around talking very informally about whatever struck our fancy. At the end of the week Lynn and I looked at each other and said, he's not going to tell us to do anythingit's up to us. We were right. Bill had a couple of research contracts that gave him the widest possible latitude to explore just about anything. I mean, it wasn't hypothesis-driven or anything like that. We essentially had to grope the whole summer towards result. We had to make it upon our own out of whole cloth. That was anew kind of challenge for us. We also learned something about Bill's character he is not the sort of person to push something down your throat, intellectually or academically. I can't think of a single time when Bill Stokoe tried to persuade me to do something. Everything you did was perfectly okay. Everyone I had been used to at that point would have had a research program, would have had a conscious research strategy governed by a set of interlocking hypotheses that get proved or disproved, leading to new hypotheses as months and years go by and evidence accumulates. So this was anew style of operating for me. It stemmed partly from the fact that Bill was a fellow of diverse talents. He probed many fields literature, anthropology, sociology, linguistics. Linguists are very stuck-up people we don't accept people who haven't gone through the same training we have and who haven't had the same theoretical grounding that we have. So while his work was inspiring, and while he laid down the groundwork for lots of linguistic work in ASL in the 's, sands, and while he was cited by everyone because he had made certain milestone contributions, he wasn't the kind of person you'd go to for help in solving problems in linguistics. But he was the one who had defied most of the things written about deafness in the 's by educators and psychologists, things that were absolute trash. This is one of the things we delighted in at the time, finding things that were writ- Download 2.48 Mb. Share with your friends:
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