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Sign languages absolutely do have a phonology. From the first sentence of the Wikipedia page on phonology: > Phonology is a branch of linguistics concerned wit

Sign languages absolutely do have a phonology. From the first sentence of the Wikipedia page on phonology: > Phonology is a branch of linguistics concerned with the systematic organization of sounds in spoken languages and signs in sign languages. I am using "syntax" in a very precise sense, as tied to linguistics generally and the Minimalist program specifically. Having a syntax = having a grammar with a merge operation and a move operation that governs relationships of the word or morpheme level units in your language. By that definition syntax is a domain "traditionally only applied to spoken languages", with the one caveat that there are a few papers out there examining whether non-linguistic grammars have merge or move operations. Because it wasn't always clear that sign languages have morphemes or words (it became widely known during the 1970s and 1980s), the syntacticians that were developing early ideas in mainstream syntax weren't doing so with sign languages in mind. So as the linguistic dogma "all languages are equally expressive" was developed, people were often not thinking explicitly of sign languages. That "all languages (including sign languages) are equally expressive" came to be appreciated was precisely because linguists started to examine how syntax and morphology might apply sign languages. If you can cite a single paper published before 1970 that discusses the syntax of a sign language from the perspective of generative linguistics, I will recant my whole statement and acknowledge that there is nothing meaningful tying the first half of the problematic sentence to the second half and that my understanding of the history of linguistics was incorrect. The earliest example I am aware of was from 1974.

thaumasiotes 7y ago
If you're going to define phonology that way, it doesn't make any sense to say that there are people studying how subfields of linguistics that traditionally apply only to spoken languages can be applied to sign languages as well, since -- by definition -- they all apply equally to spoken languages and to sign languages. That reduces the claim to "some linguists study sign languages", which is even less interesting. > I am using "syntax" in a very precise sense, as tied to linguistics generally and the Minimalist program specifically. Having a syntax = having a grammar with a merge operation and a move operation that governs relationships of the word or morpheme level units in your language. Similarly, this is a bizarre viewpoint to take. Syntax is a much older concept than that. The subfield of syntax, as "traditionally" applied to spoken languages, predates the definition you're trying to use here, by hundreds of years. And that's just talking about the subject that was literally named "syntax". Take a look at gloss A.4 here: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Dsu%2Fntacis http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%... . You are not using "syntax" in a sense that linguistics in general would recognize. You're taking a very specific feature and, without justification, naming it "syntax" in spite of the existing use of the word -- and then claiming that people who use the word normally just don't understand you. Of course they don't! And the subfield of syntax, as traditionally understood by everyone, conceptually applies to any messages governed by any rules at all. Are you really claiming that Daniel Everett would say the Pirahã language has no syntax? Or would he say that it does have syntax, and its syntax differs from those of most natural languages in that it lacks a particular feature?
- eindiran 7y ago
  > If you're going to define phonology that way... Okay fair enough. Let me rephrase my point. Phonology used to be, as you described, only the study of the organization of sounds in a language. But as research into sign languages progressed, it was realized that patterns seen with phonemes in spoken languages applied very strongly to what are now called "sign-language phonemes" in sign language. So work was done to demonstrate that these sign-language phonemes can be viewed as the units that phonological processes operate on in a sign-language, and the definition of phonology was expanded to better cover the empirical work done on sign languages. > Similarly, this is a bizarre viewpoint to take. Go read some papers on human faculty of language, particularly the 2002 and 2005 papers from Hauser Chomsky and Fitch, which are arguably the most important papers in evolutionary linguistics as a field. They define the "narrow" version of the human faculty of language based on the definition of syntax I gave, under the name "FLN-recursion". My point being, this definition I gave of "having a syntax" was drawn from this well-known idea of "FLN-recursion", so I don't think its a bizarre viewpoint at all. Regarding your comment about linguistics in general not understanding the definition of syntax I gave; I studied linguistics and many of my colleagues are doing work in theoretical linguistics, so I assure you that I do have some sense of what linguists would and would not understand. Virtually everyone who has studied syntax in the last few decades would recognize the definition. Not all linguists agree with it, as not everyone is all-in on the Minimalist program, but MP is the most mainstream school of throught in theoretical syntax by a significant margin. Taken with distributed morphology, which MP is compatible with, they cover most of the work being done in theoretical syntax today. > And the subfield of syntax, as traditionally understood by everyone, conceptually applies to any messages governed by any rules at all. I think our disagreement here is that I am using terms as defined in linguistics and you're trying to approach this using definitions from outside linguistics. I agree that "syntax" as used by lay people means precisely what you say it means. > Are you really claiming that Daniel Everett would say the Pirahã language has no syntax? Daniel Everett wouldn't claim that Pirahã has no syntax, but he was attempting to refute the idea that recursion and merge were an essential component of natural languages. If he was correct, the Chomskyians would need to re-evaluate their whole approach to syntax, but by their current definitions Pirahã would not "have a syntax" in the way that all other known natural languages do. There is an argument to be made that all of this is a bit anachronistic as the definition of "having a syntax" that we've been discussing didn't come about until the 1990s, but even in the version of "having a syntax" that comes from the earlier theories of syntax like transformational grammar, people didn't immediately see that it was true that sign languages "had a syntax" in the sense that spoken natural languages did until the mid 1970s. But back to my main point: in the late 1950s through the mid 1970s, when modern linguistics was just beginning and transformational grammar was the theory in vogue in syntax, syntacticians were just figuring out how syntax applied to spoken languages and didn't bother explicitly applying the ideas to sign languages. It wasn't until Stokoe's work Sign Language Structure started to be widely read in the 1970s that linguists started to view sign language as a bona fide linguistic system. At least as late as 1977, major papers were arguing against that conclusion on the premise that they lacked necessary components of "syntax": H. Thompson's paper "The Lack of Subordination in American Sign Language" in 1977 argued exactly that.

thaumasiotes 7y ago

If you're going to define phonology that way, it doesn't make any sense to say that there are people studying how subfields of linguistics that traditionally apply only to spoken languages can be applied to sign languages as well, since -- by definition -- they all apply equally to spoken languages and to sign languages. That reduces the claim to "some linguists study sign languages", which is even less interesting. > I am using "syntax" in a very precise sense, as tied to linguistics generally and the Minimalist program specifically. Having a syntax = having a grammar with a merge operation and a move operation that governs relationships of the word or morpheme level units in your language. Similarly, this is a bizarre viewpoint to take. Syntax is a much older concept than that. The subfield of syntax, as "traditionally" applied to spoken languages, predates the definition you're trying to use here, by hundreds of years. And that's just talking about the subject that was literally named "syntax". Take a look at gloss A.4 here: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Dsu%2Fntacis http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%... . You are not using "syntax" in a sense that linguistics in general would recognize. You're taking a very specific feature and, without justification, naming it "syntax" in spite of the existing use of the word -- and then claiming that people who use the word normally just don't understand you. Of course they don't! And the subfield of syntax, as traditionally understood by everyone, conceptually applies to any messages governed by any rules at all. Are you really claiming that Daniel Everett would say the Pirahã language has no syntax? Or would he say that it does have syntax, and its syntax differs from those of most natural languages in that it lacks a particular feature?

eindiran 7y ago
> If you're going to define phonology that way... Okay fair enough. Let me rephrase my point. Phonology used to be, as you described, only the study of the organization of sounds in a language. But as research into sign languages progressed, it was realized that patterns seen with phonemes in spoken languages applied very strongly to what are now called "sign-language phonemes" in sign language. So work was done to demonstrate that these sign-language phonemes can be viewed as the units that phonological processes operate on in a sign-language, and the definition of phonology was expanded to better cover the empirical work done on sign languages. > Similarly, this is a bizarre viewpoint to take. Go read some papers on human faculty of language, particularly the 2002 and 2005 papers from Hauser Chomsky and Fitch, which are arguably the most important papers in evolutionary linguistics as a field. They define the "narrow" version of the human faculty of language based on the definition of syntax I gave, under the name "FLN-recursion". My point being, this definition I gave of "having a syntax" was drawn from this well-known idea of "FLN-recursion", so I don't think its a bizarre viewpoint at all. Regarding your comment about linguistics in general not understanding the definition of syntax I gave; I studied linguistics and many of my colleagues are doing work in theoretical linguistics, so I assure you that I do have some sense of what linguists would and would not understand. Virtually everyone who has studied syntax in the last few decades would recognize the definition. Not all linguists agree with it, as not everyone is all-in on the Minimalist program, but MP is the most mainstream school of throught in theoretical syntax by a significant margin. Taken with distributed morphology, which MP is compatible with, they cover most of the work being done in theoretical syntax today. > And the subfield of syntax, as traditionally understood by everyone, conceptually applies to any messages governed by any rules at all. I think our disagreement here is that I am using terms as defined in linguistics and you're trying to approach this using definitions from outside linguistics. I agree that "syntax" as used by lay people means precisely what you say it means. > Are you really claiming that Daniel Everett would say the Pirahã language has no syntax? Daniel Everett wouldn't claim that Pirahã has no syntax, but he was attempting to refute the idea that recursion and merge were an essential component of natural languages. If he was correct, the Chomskyians would need to re-evaluate their whole approach to syntax, but by their current definitions Pirahã would not "have a syntax" in the way that all other known natural languages do. There is an argument to be made that all of this is a bit anachronistic as the definition of "having a syntax" that we've been discussing didn't come about until the 1990s, but even in the version of "having a syntax" that comes from the earlier theories of syntax like transformational grammar, people didn't immediately see that it was true that sign languages "had a syntax" in the sense that spoken natural languages did until the mid 1970s. But back to my main point: in the late 1950s through the mid 1970s, when modern linguistics was just beginning and transformational grammar was the theory in vogue in syntax, syntacticians were just figuring out how syntax applied to spoken languages and didn't bother explicitly applying the ideas to sign languages. It wasn't until Stokoe's work Sign Language Structure started to be widely read in the 1970s that linguists started to view sign language as a bona fide linguistic system. At least as late as 1977, major papers were arguing against that conclusion on the premise that they lacked necessary components of "syntax": H. Thompson's paper "The Lack of Subordination in American Sign Language" in 1977 argued exactly that.