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

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Page gave an account of his first exposure to sign language, his work with Trager and Smith, the creation of Sign Language Structure,
and the compilation of the dictionary. He talked about Sign Language Studies and the people whose work he had published there. And he warned against the tendency among current researchers to ignore "the give-and-take of human interaction" in favor of "the fascinating and remote nooks and crannies of linguistic structure" 27 (It was this statement, among others, that led Carol
Padden to wonder whether Stokoe was still "apart of the very modern discipline of sign language linguistics) Stokoe defended his position in the conclusion of his address:
This view, that equal attention must be given to language, to the people who use it, and to what they use it for and about,
has not impressed those who want to find in language a perfect, abstract system. It is a view that recent events have vindicated, however. Consider this if sign language research in America had been directed solely at the internal structure of ASL, and if only a "standard model" grammar of all that linguists know about it were now in print, very few persons other than linguists would even know ASL existed. What has happened, however, as everyone . . . knows, is that in passionate defense of their own language and culture, deaf people have turned Gallaudet University around. What people fight for is their right to have their culture and their language respected, not the details of that language in the abstract.29
Despite Stokoe's enthusiasm, all is not well at Gallaudet. Lou Fant describes current conditions as follows:
I don't think Gallaudet has ever appreciated what Bill did. They shoved him around, cutoff funds for his research, and breathed a sigh of relief when he retired. Oh, they pay him lip service, but look at it. The university has yet to declare officially that ASL is the language of deaf people. . . . Gallaudet still does not require ASL fluency from its faculty. Look what happened to Carl Dupree. That could have been avoided had the security guards been fluent in ASL. [Dupree, a deaf
Gallaudet student, was strangled to death in 1990 in a struggle

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