Cover next page > title: Seeing Language in Sign : The Work of William C. Stokoe author

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Page however, he was fiercely loyal to his friends, never abandoning them his support of his secretary from the English Department is only one example. Once Stokoe had taken someone under his wingor once someone exhibited loyalty to himthere was no doubt that he would support that person, even if it took personal or professional sacrifice.
Stokoe's reactions to people he considered unfair or illogical were equally strong he criticized them without reserve, with little concern for the effect his criticism had on them and even less concern for the consequences to himself or his interests. There was no middle ground with Bill Stokoe; people either adored or despised him.
Although Stokoe antagonized many of the administrators at Gallaudet, he continued to attract funding and topflight linguists to the lab. These linguists were taking his ideas and branching outwith them, and in someways they were leaving Stokoe behind.
Carol Padden explains that this was almost inevitable:
With respect to sign language linguistics, I think at some point the discipline took off in directions that Bill couldn't, or rather, didn't want to, pursue. His seminal work on phonological structure spawned a very complex field of sign language phonology that, ironically, I don't think Bill fully understands (for example, the work of Perlmutter, Liddell and Johnson,
Sandler, Brentari, Corina. He gave a keynote talk at the Gallaudet International Sign Language Research Conference during which he wondered whether this new complexity and abstraction were worth the trouble. He called fora return to meaningful research, and the feeling I had was that he wasn't apart of the very modern discipline of sign language linguistics. But it should be said that sign phonology today has reached a level of such complexity and detail that it has left a lot of compatriots scratching their heads, not just Bill. Robbin Battison thinks that Stokoe's lack of formal training in linguistics probably contributed to his ability to see what no one else had seen before, but that eventually it held him back as his linguistic audience became more sophisticated.
In the late 'sand early 's Stokoe was the only person who

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