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

< previous page
page_96
next page >
Page 96
lated, both for himself and others, his growing knowledge of American Sign Language. He had literally created anew field of research, and linguists from allover the United States and around the world were beginning to look to him for information and guidance.
Dorothy Casterline recalls being told by Barbara Kannapell (a Gallaudet student who later became a leading spokesperson for the rights of deaf people) that many in the deaf community viewed her, Croneberg, and Stokoe as pioneers. The dictionary, even more than Sign Language Structure, was the evidence needed "to show that deaf people can be studied as linguistic and cultural communities, and not only as unfortunate victims with similar physical and sensory pathologies." 42 The dictionary was cited in practically every article or book published about sign language from the moment it appearedit even inspired the British
Department of Education and Science to release a report entitled "The Education of Deaf Children The Possible Place of
Fingerspelling and Signing."
But it was business as usual at Gallaudet. Stokoe says that while Sign Language Structure had "gotten a lot of flak, the dictionary got nothing. With National Science Foundation funds we ordered 5,000 copies printed, more books than the
Gallaudet bookstore at that time handled in several years. I suggested to the bookstore manager that we set a price and make room in the tiny bookstore fora display of the dictionary. But nothing came of that. The dictionaries were stashed away in cartons in a place where the leakage from an antique indoor swimming pool soaked a great many, ruining them."43
All the while, Stokoe continued to teach and to chair the English department. Soon after the dictionary was published he "completely revised" the syllabus fora graduate sign language syntax course he had decided to teach for the first time.
I had a class of six or seven students, one or two hearing and the rest deaf. I was trying to draw up a syllabus, but when I
got down to it, I had to ask myself, what did I know about sign language syntax other than the fact that most of the syntactic signals were nonmanual? The students didn't have to hear me lecture about it they could just read what I had written.

Download 2.48 Mb.

Share with your friends: