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

< previous page
page_61
next page >
Page made. With these things and much more learned at the feet of genuine experts, I was equipped at least to start something new. All in all, it was a pivotal summer for my life and work. Without knowing it, Stokoe was about to start a revolution. Today his admirers, particularly linguists, equate his discoveries with those of Galileo and Einstein they wonder why he hasn't received a Nobel prize. Many refer to Thomas Kuhn's theory of paradigm changes and scientific revolutions in connection with Stokoe's discoveries. But fora longtime, most of the hearing faculty at Gallaudet didn't know what he was talking about, and most deaf users of American Sign Language were either incredulous or downright hostile. How could a hearing person whose area of expertise was Chaucer presume to do research on "the sign language"signing was something that deaf people simply "did" As Padden and Humphries have noted, "It was simply unthinkable at the time to refer to signed language in the kind of terms used by modern linguists.''3
But that's exactly what Bill Stokoe did. As soon as he returned to Gallaudet in the fall of 1957, he began to study his students'
signs more closely. Gil Eastman, who was still a Gallaudet student at the time, remembers the confusion Stokoe's work engendered. As an example, he recounts the following exchange with a deaf professor early in Professor Do you know that Dr. Stokoe is going to study sign language?
[Eastman] Yes, he had better.
Professor: I do not mean that he is learning sign language. He actually studies sign language.
[Eastman] So?
Professor: He is doing linguistic research.
[Eastman] Linguistic?
Professor: Study of language, science of language. He will analyze our sign language!4
For the next three years, in addition to teaching classes at Gallaudet and chairing the English Department, Stokoe set about answering the question he had posed for himself "What if sophisticated visual symbol systems were to be examined by

Download 2.48 Mb.

Share with your friends: