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ganization truly constitutes the morphocheremics of the language" Ina study published in 1970, Stokoe drew further analogies between signed and spoken languages:
Seen as a whole system . . . sign language is quite like English or any other language. Its elements contrast with each other, visibly instead of audibly. They combine in certain ways, not in others. These combinations, signs, "have meaning"
as words or morphemes do. Constructions combining signs, like constructions combining words, express meanings more completely and complexly than single signs or words can. These constructions or syntactic structures are systematic, rule- governed structures.
But there is a unique set of rules for making sign language constructions just as there is for making standard English constructions, nonstandard English constructions, or the constructions of any language.21
With each analogy to English and other spoken languages, Stokoe further undermined long-held beliefs about "the sign language":
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that it was limited both in vocabulary and in its ability to produce grammatical sentences,
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that it was iconographicnothing more than graphic pictures drawn in the air,
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that it resembled pantomime,
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that it was universal, and
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that it could not be used to express the abstract.
Stokoe was convinced that sign and speech were equaland that both were manifestations of language.
By April of 1960, three years after his summer in Buffalo and only five years after he had joined the faculty of Gallaudet, Bill
Stokoe had completed Sign Language Structure, which after giving a brief history of sign language "applied a rigorous linguistic methodology" to it. The paper also described Stokoe's method of transcription, to "expedite the study of any gestural communication with the depth and complexity characteristic of a language."22
In Sign Language Structure Stokoe took on Trager and Smith,

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