THE PROBLEM OF LANGUAGE

We have suggested that human language is both a source and a cure of communication problems between people. To understand this thesis, it will help first to establish some common terms of discussion.

Schematically, we can look upon human linguistic communication as the product of the interaction of four variables (see figure 1.1).

Fig. 1.1 Variables in Human Linguistic Communication

Linguists and semioticians have sliced up the communicative pie in a variety of ways, but for our purposes we can speak of the individual and his relationship to the world of experience, to language (linguistic structure), and to other people (society). Which of the four variables we place in the middle of the diagram may be indicative of which issue we see as most important in the use of language. The psychologist (or psycholinguist) might be happiest placing the individual in the center; the linguist, linguistic structure; the philosopher, experience; and the sociologist (or sociolinguist), society. At this point, however, it is unnecessary to take sides with one group of specialists or another, since, regardless of how we arrange the variables, it is clear that each variable may interact with every other.

The scheme itself is straightforward. In communicating with one another, individuals use language which refers to their experiences. Language is a collocation of elements (be they sounds or letters, words or hand signs) which are encoded in a particular representational modality (speech, writing, or sign). Individuals use language as a way of representing their experiences, although the culture or social group of which those individuals (and their languages) are a part may influence which aspects of experience are represented linguistically and which specific structural manifestation these representations take.

But problems arise as soon as we try to put the scheme into practice; not problems with the scheme, but with the linguistic communication the scheme is designed to encode. We might group these problems into three categories for simplicity of discussion, although breakdowns in all three areas are interdependent.

WHAT DO USERS OF A “COMMON LANGUAGE” HOLD IN COMMON?

No matter what brand of linguistic analysis one subscribes to, be it Ferdinand de Saussure’s langue (1959), Noam Chomsky’s competence (1965), or Dell Hymes’s communicative competence (1972), a necessary assumption is that users of a language hold something in common. Our question is, How much language actually is held in common in the best of circumstances, and what happens when conditions are less than ideal?

Signs and Sentences

Consider first the backbone of semiotic theory (and of much of linguistics as well): the linguistic sign. Both semiotics and linguistics assume the existence of an entity called a sign such that an expression (e.g., sound) and a meaning component can be identified (Saussure’s [ 1959]signifiant and signifié, respectively) and that the pairing of that particular expression and meaning is shared by a community of users. But herein lies a paradox. Because no two individuals share the same histories, no two individuals share precisely the same pairings of sound and meaning. And if we do not have corresponding linguistic signs—and, worse yet, are unaware of the linguistic mismatch—then our language fails us at the most basic level of social interaction.

Is it an exaggeration to say that language users do not have shared linguistic signs? As soon as one goes outside the realm of contemporary linguistic discourse, one finds arguments which seriously question the existence of linguistic Platonic forms (either as meanings or as grammatical rules) which all native language users will “know.” Perhaps the most forceful of these arguments has been put forth by Wittgenstein (1953, 1958), who denied the existence of unitary meanings for words.² At best, he argued, we can speak of “family resemblances” of words, in which each member of the family shares some property with some other member of the family, but there do not necessarily exist any specific properties which all members share:

The philosophical literature is filled with critiques of the Platonic approach to meaning (e.g., Black, 1949; Cohen, 1962). However, with some isolated exceptions (e.g., Weinreich, 1966; Lakoff, 1970a, 1972; Lehrer, 1970; Kooij, 1971; Labov, 1973), the question of whether linguistic signs have definable boundaries is rarely raised among linguists.

The question of what is shared across language users becomes more problematical when we switch from the lexical to the grammatical level. Is every human language actually reducible to a delineable set of rules which all native users of the language “know”? Almost twenty years of investigation has gone into specifying the syntactic “knowledge” of native speakers of English. Unfortunately, as any student of transformational grammar knows, there remain hundreds of sentences—01* sentence types—which we still do not know how to analyze.

A vivid backdrop against which to consider this question of the pervasiveness of grammatical knowledge is English composition. The contemporary literature on higher education is filled with the problern of why otherwise intelligent college students do not seem able to write grammatical English.

It is commonly assumed that such students speak perfectly well (slipups being accounted for by Chomskian performance factors), but something happens when they take pen in hand. If we take the Chomskian model of competence seriously, we are faced with a problem. If we assume that native language users “know the grammar” of their language, we would predict that their writing would be more grammatical than their speaking, since, paradigmatically, writing allows for more reflection than does normal speaking. There are, to my knowledge, no available data which accurately compare levels of grammaticality of writing and speaking in the populations we are talking about. What teachers of English composition are painfully aware of, though, is that many native speakers—and native writers-are unable to produce grammatical written prose, no matter how much time they are given to ponder their work. A linguistic theory which assumes universal “knowledge of grammar” will need to come to grips with this problem.

Once we have questioned the traditional assumption of the universality of grammatical competence, we can approach the issue of the commonality of signs among language users from two interconnected perspectives. We can ask whether, given normal physical and mental capacities, every human individual will become equally competent (i.e., fluent plus grammatical) as a user of the language of his native community. And, in those instances in which we have no overt reason to question fluency, we can examine what evidence might be necessary to show that, nonetheless, meanings of signs are not constant across language users.

Take, first, the issue of language-user fluency. Here are two sentences which I have heard uttered over the past few years:

I take an ecelectic approach to the study of cognitive development.

I’m sorry our paths crossed on Thursday evening, and I didn’t see you.

One might wish to argue that what we are witnessing are slips of the tongue, garden-variety mistakes which the speaker would recognize upon reflection. Unfortunately, the argument holds no water, since these same mistakes were uttered on several occasions by the same individuals. Alternatively, one might contend that the speakers had not gone to school. Again, the hypothesis fails. The individual who believed the word eclectic was actually ecelectic held a Ph.D. and taught at a major American university, and the one who failed to realize the meaning of the phrase paths crossed has a college education.

As long as one assumes the existence of the ideal speaker-hearer within us, these sentences are difficult to explain. However, if we are willing to consider grammaticality as a variable rather than as an absolute property of language, we find that sentences such as those above can be encompassed within the broader question of whether language users indeed share signs, regardless of the surface grammaticality of their sentences.

To explore this question, let us begin by considering a third sentence:

Let’s not get bogged down in a philosophical argument.

The comment is one I frequently hear from colleagues in all branches of academia; that is, in all but philosophy departments. Outside the discipline of philosophy, there seems to be a common—and incorrect-assumption that philosophical argument means just so much hand-waving. In fact, as those with any training in philosophy know, the phrase has precisely the opposite meaning. In the world of language use, this kind of problem arises repeatedly. We build up associations between words and objects, events, emotions, and the like. We then assume that when another person uses a word or phrase, his semantic intent is the same as ours.

But there is a paradox here. The only way in which speakers can determine what a word means is to build up public associations between that word and the concrete or conceptual domains to which it refers in the minds of other language users. In behavioral terms, we learn meanings by hearing them used in context. Or, in a less passive view of language learning, we conclude that we understand a word when its utterance brings results: the appearance of a slab of stone upon the utterance of the command “Slab!” The paradox is that we tend to jump to conclusions about mutual comprehension on the basis of very little evidence. Unless we are especially concerned to know precisely what a speaker means by a particular word, we tend to assume he means just the same thing that we do—“You know what I mean” “Yeah”—when the respondent merely knows what he himself means.

The phenomenon of assuming that we understand a speaker’s signs when in fact we do not is often pointed up in literature. Hence the passage in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in which Mark Antony reiterates his description of Brutus as an “honorable man.” The irony of the statement does not become clear until well into the oration. It is precisely this embellishment of a conversation, this probing into one’s meaning, that typically does not occur in everyday language. And for that reason, we are typically unaware of whether we actually share referents with our interlocutors.

Another reason why mismatches in meanings are frequently not perceived in casual conversation is that most of these individuations of meanings are found in the lexicon rather than in syntax. The lack of common syntax is far more easily perceived—and then brought into line—than the lack of common referents for signs. If I tell you that I’m sorry our paths crossed and therefore we didn’t meet, you as interlocutor can immediately perceive the problem and question me until I learn what is wrong with my syntax. However, if you use a word or phrase (like philosophical argument), and I have no reason to suspect your meaning is not identical to mine, I have no simple way of perceiving the mismatch.

At this point in the argument, the devil’s advocate might ask, “But what is so new about this observation that not all meanings are shared?” Jakobson, for example, in distinguishing between general and specific meanings of a word, argued that while every word has a general meaning, the specific meaning of a word can only be understood in context:

The question, however, is, precisely what kind of entity is a general meaning? Is it a hypostatized entity whose only existence is in the world of lexicographers, linguists, and perhaps some rare individuals whose speech is largely made up of a limited number of rote phrases? If we actually tried the empirical task of selecting those meaning features which a community of language users have in common for a particular linguistic sign, it is not obvious that in their spontaneous (noncitation) use for that sign, speakers share enough features to construct a workable dictionary definition.³

A second question our devil’s advocate might ask is whether we are blowing the problem out of all proportion. What does it matter if the meanings we attach to words are not precisely the same? We are quite willing to admit exceptions to many of the defining features we use to identify human languages in the first place. While maintaining our belief in the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign (at least in spoken language), we do not deny the existence of onomatopoeia, which we tend to see almost as the exception that proves the rule. Yet is the issue of the arbitrariness of the sign really comparable to the issue of whether signs are shared between language users? Not at all. In the first instance, we might decide to abandon the notion of arbitrariness altogether as a design feature of human language without changing our conception of language itself or of the fundamental ways in which we analyze language. However, in the case of the sign, to acknowledge that pairings of signifié and signifiant are not shared is to deny the possibility of studying language as a social activity.

Individuals, Experience, and Society

The question of what users of a “common language” really hold in common can be viewed from a nonlinguistic perspective as well. Since structure, experience, and society are interdependent variables, many of the same problems we have just been looking at in terms of linguistic constructs can be seen in terms of one’s experience—individual or social—which one uses language to encode. Thus, philosophers and, say, chemists understand the phrase “philosophical argument” differently because of their differing experience with—and commitments to—the use of philosophical arguments.

The literature is filled with graphic examples of the barriers which experiential and social variables pose to mutual comprehension. Consider the case of a child in a Sunday school class who was asked “to illustrate the story of the fall of Adam and Eve and their subsequent punishment”:

Or consider a story related by the children’s poet Kornei Chukovsky. A Russian child, when asked why she had not provided a knife and fork for a dinner guest, replied, “Because I thought he didn’t need them—Daddy said he ate like a horse” (1965:13). Part of learning a language is learning to distinguish between literal and metaphoric meanings, which entails learning social conventions of language use. It may also entail, as in the first example, learning to place linguistic encodings in historical contexts (Genesis predates the Age of Henry Ford). In the second instance, language learning may include learning levels of social appropriateness—knowing what comments are permissible in which social settings.

TRANSLATION: A LOGICAL EXTENSION OF THE PROBLEM OF COMMONALITY

There are, as we have seen, inherent problems in communicating even between language users who purportedly use the same language. These problems intensify when we try to switch either language or modality of expression. The problems of translation between linguistic systems are similar to the language-internal problems we have just considered. In both, we confront language users who do not share structures, experience, or social conventions. The main difference is that in the first instance, incompatibility between languages is not recognized as easily as it is in the case of translation.

The most obvious examples are translations between languages. In poetry or literature—including the Bible—the problem arises repeatedly. Nida cites the difficulty of using a literal translation for “he beat his breast” (Luke 18:13):

Translation problems become more subtle—but no less real—when we must translate across representational modalities (e.g., sign vs. speech) as well as across languages which are expressed in the same modality (e.g., spoken English vs. spoken French). Court cases frequently involve deaf defendants who understand American Sign Language but not American English. Judges often insist that court translators (from speech to sign and vice versa) give the precise meaning of the questions addressed to the defendant and of the defendant’s responses, without interjecting any of his (the translator’s) own interpretation. However, since American Sign Language and American English are distinctly different languages formulated in markedly different modalities (see Chapter 7), such neutral translation is not always possible. How does one translate the subtleties of a leading question or an evasive answer?

Even closer to our own experience is the problem of how to translate paralanguage—those facial, gestural, and intonational nuances with which we accompany speech. In his metalogue “Why Do Frenchmen?” Bateson raises the question of “why . . . Frenchmen wave their arms about . . . when they talk” (1972:9). A father, in a hypothetical conversation with his daughter, observes,

But his daughter persists in asking, “When they teach us French at school, why don’t they teach us to wave our hands?” The fathers honest reply is, “I don’t know. I’m sure I don’t know. That is probably one of the reasons why people find learning languages so difficult” (1972:13).

DO WE ACTUALLY TRY TO COMMUNICATE AT ALL?

Up to this point, I have been talking about problems of linguistic communication which arise because of incompatibilities between linguistic systems, experiences, and social conventions of individuals. I have been presupposing that the intent to communicate is present, but that for some reason the communicative system keeps breaking down.

But do we always work toward getting messages (feelings, impressions, or whatnot) across to an interlocutor? Or are there times—either personal or entrenched within an entire subculture—in which the individual is directly responsible for breaking the links in a potential communicative chain?

In most instances, the cues of communicative breakdown are difficult to pick up. Consider such a simple issue as whether people in contemporary American society communicate by talking with one another on a regular basis. Of course, you say. But do they? In the late 1960s, Ray Birdwhistell decided to find out. He studied one hundred couples who had been married fifteen years or more and were regarded as reasonably happy. The results showed the median amount of time spent in conversation with one another was twenty-seven and a half minutes per week. What is more, Birdwhistell notes that this figure is somewhat high because his subjects did a lot of visiting and “had to give each other driving instructions” (Sheehy, 1973:34). Birdwhistell points out that failure to speak does not necessarily mean failure to communicate, especially among people who have known each other for some time. And yet one cannot help but wonder how much communication is really going on among members of a society whose primary mode of communication is speech. Observers of the contemporary social scene such as Christopher Lasch (1979) or Peter Marin attribute the decline in speech to a rise in self-aggrandizement:

A similar breakdown has been observed in our use of the written word. While on the one hand the popular press has been critical of the decline of writing skills among the nation’s youth, astute observers such as David Riesman and George Steiner have warned that the purposeful and private act of reading may be fading from the middle-class scene. (We will examine the status of reading and writing in contemporary America in some detail in Chapter 6). Regardless of where one wishes to heap the blame, it is now fairly clear that a significant portion of the “educated” population does not see writing as a means of making someone else understand what is on its mind. In the words of Donald Holden:

These breakdowns in the desire to engage in social communication through the spoken and written word find their logical conclusion in pathology, in the language of the schizophrenic. The breakdown can be seen both in the generation of contradictory linguistic signals, which according to Bateson’s double bind hypothesis (e.g., Bateson et al. 1956) can lead the receiver to schizophrenia, and in the language of the schizophrenic himself, who creates a code of which he is the only user. Just as the problems of commonality are greater between languages than across languages, so, too, schizophrenic language can be seen as the logical extension of a growing withdrawal from the use of speech and writing to foster social communication.

The book which follows is not a study of social problems. It is a study of the problems which language helps to solve. But in addition to its linguistic value, it has, we might hope, a derivative social value as well. By better understanding how and why language works in the ways it does, we may be in a better position to understand where and why it might fail us and what we can do about it.

THE OBJECT OF STUDY

I have said that this book is a study of human language. An introduction if you will. What it serves to introduce, though, distinguishes it from the classical (e.g., Sapir, 1921; Bloomfield, 1933) or modern (e.g., Bolinger, 1968; Langacker, 1973; Fromkin and Rodman, 1978) introductory works. Linguistics has evolved into a discipline whose primary purpose is to analyze the languages people speak (or have spoken) and to comment on the internal workings of the languages, i.e., on their structures. Whether such comments are intended to be descriptive or explanatory and whether the descriptions or explanations are taken to represent structure as potentially available to a speaker or structure as actually used in communicating with another person—all this depends on the theoretical interests (and biases) of the linguist doing the work.

These studies are useful, but are they enough? Is there anything else we wish to know about human language that turns out to be so fundamental that it lies at the very core of our subject? I suggest that there is. Some of the queries—and solutions—which we will raise here are not new. What is especially new is the suggestion that these problems constitute a coherent nexus which should be considered together, and that an examination of these problems is as fundamental to understanding human language as is an understanding of phonological and grammatical structures of human utterances. What is more, by locating these problems at the very core of a study of human language, we will derive not only a clearer understanding of human speech but also a more solid base than the one currently available for building linguistic theories.

The issues I propose moving to center stage stem from the same basic questions any linguist wishes to answer: What is a human language used for? How does it accomplish its ends? However, rather than accepting the stereotypic response that language is used to communicate, and does so by chaining together linguistic signs (forms paired with meanings) through identifiable patterns, we will be looking more deeply at what it is that is being communicated, why that information should be deemed important by the participants in the linguistic interchange, and how the interchange is accomplished. Our goal will be to figure out what influence the content (what), the reason (why), and the means (how) have upon these “identifiable patterns” (the grammatical forms and rules), which are being used for getting a message across.

To recast these questions somewhat, we will be considering three problems:

What is a linguistic representation?

What are the expressive or perceptive channels (or modalities) through which these representations can be made?

In what ways are the choices of linguistic representations (with respect to modality, lexical item, and grammatical patterning) derivable from the functional contexts in which the linguistic interchange occurs?

We shall also find that the issue of modality has barely been raised, since it has been nearly universally assumed that speech is the only serious object of linguistic inquiry. Finally, we shall demonstrate that the functional orientation which is beginning to come into its own in the study of speech can productively be extended both to visual linguistic modalities (writing and sign language) and to studies of the composition of the linguistic sign itself.

NOVELTY AND TRADITION: CINDERELLA’S SLIPPER

The cross-modal perspective we will be assuming is at once a radical and conservative position from which to study human language. It is radical inasmuch as writing and sign language have not been objects of the typical linguistic text, but, as we shall see in this section, conservative in that twentieth-century linguistic theory was founded upon the premise that languages must be analyzed on their own terms.

The exclusion of written and sign languages from the mainstream of linguistic analysis is particularly ironic in the context of the American linguistic tradition. American linguistics, starting with the work of Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Leonard Bloomfield, developed in response to an ethnographic predicament. Confronted with a large number of American Indian languages which were unrelated to Indo-European tongues,⁴ missionaries, and then government agents and anthropologists, had no firm grammatical guidelines for describing the languages they encountered in North America.

For the earlier explorers and missionaries, the most natural tendency was to interpret the languages either in light of their native tongue (typically French⁵ or Spanish) or, particularly in the case of missionaries, in terms of Latin:

Missionaries’ use of Latin as a linguistic standard is partially attributable to their training. The Jesuits, the most active missionary group concerned with North American Indian languages, uniformly “spent years of their early career teaching Latin and various subjects in Latin” before embarking on missionary work in America (Hanzeli, 1969:33). But the centrality of the Latin model in missionary linguistics was not entirely a function of prior linguistic exposure. Rather, deriving from the work of medieval speculative grammarians, Latin came to be recognized as the universal, essential language from which all other tongues derived (ibid.).

Armed with a Latin phonology and grammar, the missionary linguist set out to establish correspondences between Latin (or sometimes French or English, which were themselves grammatically formalized in Latinate terms) and the unknown American Indian tongue. Where constructions were—or at least appeared to be—comparable, the task of description proceeded smoothly. However, at points of divergence (i.e., where the new language lacked grammatical distinctions present in Latin or French, or presented distinctions not found in European tongues) the response was one of “plain bewilderment and the ensuing defensive assumption that the new language was ‘imperfect’ or ‘lacked rules’” (Hanzeli, 1969:63). In the more linguistically enlightened treatises, the linguistic integrity of the newly discovered language was maintained by creating new categories of analysis as they became necessary. In other instances, however, the missionary’s inability to puzzle out the grammatical rules of a language was taken as evidence that no such rules existed and that the inferred “primitive” nature of the language indicated a primitive mentality. If American Indian languages could not be fit into the Cinderella’s slipper of Latinate grammar, then the strange languages must be inadequate.

Boas spent much of his professional life decrying this assumption of the cultural and linguistic inferiority of the American Indian. The Introduction to the Handbook of American Indian Languages (1911, reprinted 1966) contains his explicit attempts to argue for the independence of race, culture, and language, and to establish the need for a value-free method of linguistic description. This latter challenge was taken up by Bloomfield, who, in the second edition of Language (1933), laid the groundwork for American descriptive linguistics. Epitomized by Joos’s dictum that “languages can differ from each other without limit and in unpredictable ways” (Joos, 1957:96), American linguistics of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s worked toward defining a procedure for deriving grammatical descriptions that acknowledged the linguistic integrity of “strange” languages and that were wholly unbiased by descriptions appropriate for other languages. Subsequent work in linguistics, most notably that of Chomsky and his students, has argued that earlier linguistic atomism made commonalities across languages difficult if not impossible to recognize. Interest in language universals has now swung the grammatical pendulum back toward the presupposition of a single “universal” grammar, although our experience with handling empirical data over the past six or seven decades should help us avoid the problems of apriorism to which our missionary predecessors often fell victim.

We have seen that American linguistic analysis grew out of the recognition that not all languages originate from the same linguistic mold, and therefore valid linguistic descriptions must be cast in terms of the actual language under investigation. What we have not noted so far, however, is that this insistence upon the integrity of the language under investigation was entirely restricted to spoken language. No comparable provisions were made in the American descriptivist tradition for considering the integrity of either written or sign languages as forms which needed to be recognized and analyzed in their own terms, with the results of these analyses being used to investigate the extent to which writing and sign were influenced by—or had influence on—spoken language. Instead, like the early missionaries attempting to reduce American Indian languages to Latin (and, where not possible, declaring the languages primitive or degenerate), American linguistics has reduced written language to the status of a “transcription” of what is spoken and has tended to regard sign language as a primitive or degenerate form of speech. Ironically, while American linguists were extolling the virtues of objective analysis for one set of languages, they systematically withheld objectivity from their dealings with another set. How did this irony come about?

In intellectual inquiry, one can never argue definitively why a phenomenon does not occur. Negative results may be the product of any one of a potentially infinite set of causes, the most unlikely of which may be the actual culprit. However, in the case of the failure of linguistics to make comparable attempts to understand written and sign languages as were made for speech, we can cite some relevant evidence for which any subsequent causal explanation would have to account.

Since the birth of nineteenth-century comparative philology, the position of writing in linguistic analysis has always been tenuous at best. Even in the work of the Neogrammarians, the languages being reconstructed were, presumably, spoken languages, although the only evidence available for reconstruction was written.⁶ Saussure made the primacy of speech in linguistic analysis more overt, a move which was plausible (though not necessary) insofar as his concern was for contemporary speech. Nevertheless, he necessarily retained the duplicity inherent in the work of the Neogrammarians (i.e., he claimed to be analyzing speech, but used written records) to the extent that his concerns were diachronie.

From its modern European inception, the discipline of linguistics restricted its inquiry (at least in principle) to spoken language, introducing written materials only where necessary for diachronie study. In Europe, emphasis on spoken language derived, at least in part, from the growing interest in dialectal variation. Since in most cases nonstandard dialects were not written down,⁷ written language was excluded from formal linguistic inquiry. The situation in the United States was actually quite similar. Since there was practically no indigenous writing in North America,⁸ there was no question of studying written or spoken language. “Writing” entered the scene only as a way for the linguist to keep records of what his informants had said. Writing was, quite literally, “merely a way of recording language by means of visible marks.”

Sign language study in the American linguistic tradition has its own history of misunderstanding and neglect. At least two factors seem to have been significant here. The most important—and obvious—of these factors is that sign language was not the primary means of communication of any of the linguistic communities early American anthropologists were interested in studying. Sign language was in fact frequently used by American Plains Indians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, use of sign had begun to subside by the turn of the twentieth century, and more significantly, sign had never been used by the Indians as their sole or even primary means of communication. Rather, it was used only in a circumscribed set of contexts (see Chapter 7). Despite a fair number of descriptions of American Indian sign (the most thorough being the work of Garrick Mallery), American Indian Sign Language was not given serious linguistic attention until La Mont Wests studies (i960). Instead, sign was dismissed from the domain of linguistic inquiry as a poor approximation of spoken language in much the same way as trade jargons and pidgins were largely dismissed as bastardized forms of “real” languages before the work of Robert Hall (e.g., 1955—see Chapter 5).

A second factor concerns the status of sign language in deaf communities. Current observations of deaf individuals outside formal educational settings suggest that an elementary signing system typically develops when deaf individuals need to communicate with either deaf or hearing populations (e.g., Kuschel, 1974; Gleitman, Feldman, and Goldin-Meadow, 1978). In some instances, as in the case of late eighteenth-century France, the signs used by an indigenous deaf population are standardized and augmented, and taught to a broader deaf community. The Abbé de l’Épée was responsible for creating French Sign Language out of information gathered from native deaf signers, overlaid with some principles of French grammar. This system was brought to the United States by Thomas Gallaudet in 1816, and adopted (though also adapted) by the American deaf. While the signing system gained considerable currency in the United States in schools for the deaf which opened in the ensuing years, the use of sign in the classroom was offset by a strong move towards oralist education (see chapter 7). By the early part of the twentieth century, oralism had taken hold. Therefore, it is not surprising that interest in sign language in linguistic circles was all but nonexistent. Sign language was used only within the deaf community itself (not in view of the hearing community) both because of the educational dictum that the deaf must be taught to speak and because of the practical consideration that hearing people generally do not understand sign.

With very few (and mostly recent) exceptions, the educational level of the deaf in the U.S. has remained low, and until the 1970s there have been almost no fluent users of sign language—either deaf or hearing—who have been associated with the linguistics profession. Accordingly, there has, until recently, been no internal impetus for dispelling myths about the “degenerate” status of sign and its purported dependence on spoken language. Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, these assumptions have begun to change, largely because of the work spearheaded by Stokoe (1972, 1974, 1978) and Bellugi (Klima and Bellugi, 1979). However, while linguistic attention is currently being turned to sign language, there has been little effort to integrate the analysis of sign with that of the two other modalities of linguistic expression—speech and writing. Such an integration is one of the purposes of this book.

This integration is not its sole aim. Spoken, written, and sign languages are considered not simply as objects of linguistic analysis, through whose joint examination we can improve our understanding of the breadth of human language. Rather, they are seen as different linguistic means, or what we here call modes, of representing human experiences which people find reason to convey to one another. Interest in language as representation has been neglected nearly as much as have the visual modes of linguistic representation—writing and sign. Therefore, this discussion begins with representation as a linguistic problem.

OVERVIEW

The examination of representation in chapter 2 asks, What is a representation of any sort and what, more particularly, is a linguistic representation? Since linguistic representations are the basic fabric out of which human languages are woven, we are led to reexamine the fundamental question of what a human language is (chapter 3). This reexamination draws upon the discussion of representation and points forward to the issues of modality and purpose in language.

As we shall see, acontextual, structural attempts at definition break down when we try testing them against actual data. For this, as well as for additional reasons to be delineated, we turn to language use as a critical factor in defining what we mean by language (chapter 4). In the process, I shall elaborate upon the functional perspective which underlies one of our basic theses—that linguistic structure is, to a significant degree, a product of social, nonlinguistic factors.

This hypothesis is developed in some detail in chapters 5, 6, and 7, where it is argued that the choice of a particular modality, as well as development of subtypes within modalities (e.g., of different spoken languages, of varying forms of writing) can be analyzed functionally. In the course of the discussions of spoken, written, and sign languages, respectively, each means of linguistic expression is distinguished from related communicative but nonlinguistic representation. Once these elements are factored out, a comparison is made between structural and functional classifications of each mode of language. The relationships between structure and function are then illustrated for each modality.