Sherman Wilcox

University of New Mexico | UNM · Department of Linguistics

This paper examines how signers make lists. One way is to use the fingers on the signer’s nondominant hand to enumerate items on a list. The signer points to these list-fingers with the dominant hand. Previous analyses considered lists to be nondominant, one-handed signs, and thus were called list buoys because the nondominant hand often remains in...

In this article I describe a framework for unifying spoken language, signed language, and gesture. Called the language as motion framework, it relies on three broad theories: cognitive grammar, dynamic systems, and cognitive neuroscience. The foundational claim of the language in motion framework is that language and gesture are manifestations of a...

In this chapter we discuss how reported communication in narrative interactions is expressed in Argentine Sign Language (LSA). We analyze data from three different types of reported communicative interactions. Working within the theory of cognitive grammar, we have proposed the concepts of Place as a symbolic structure, which is a meaningful spatia...

Signed languages employ finely articulated facial and head displays to express grammatical meanings such as mood and modality, complex propositions (conditionals, causal relations, complementation), information structure (topic, focus), assertions, content and yes/no questions, imperatives, and miratives. In this paper we examine two facial display...

We examine the conceptualization of space in signed language discourse within the theory of cognitive grammar. Adopting a Places view, we define Place as a symbolic structure that associates a schematic semantic pole and a schematic phonological pole. Places acquire full contextual meaning and a specific spatial location in the context of a usage e...

In this paper we describe a cognitive grammar approach to the study of signed language grammar. Using data from different signed languages, we explore three broad topics. First, we examine pointing, Place, and placing. We analyze pointing as a construction consisting of a pointing device, a symbolic structure which directs the interlocutor’s concep...

In this paper we describe a cognitive grammar approach to the study of signed language grammar. Using data from different signed languages, we explore three broad topics. First, we examine pointing, Place, and placing. We analyze pointing as a construction consisting of a pointing device, a symbolic structure which directs the interlocutor’s concep...

Grounding refers to expressions that establish a connection between the ground and the content evoked by a nominal or finite clause. In this paper we report on two grammatical implementations of nominal grounding in Argentine Sign Language: pointing and placing. For pointing constructions, we also examine distal and proximal pointing. We introduce...

This chapter examines evidentiality in signed languages. Data comes primarily from three signed languages—American Sign Language (ASL), Brazilian Sign Language (Libras), and Catalan Sign Language (LSC). The relationship between evidentiality, epistemic modality, and mirativity is examined across the expression of perceptual information as an eviden...

Every language has a way of saying how one knows what one is talking about, and what one thinks about what one knows. In some languages, one always has to specify the information source on which it is based—whether the speaker saw the event, or heard it, or inferred it based on something seen or on common sense, or was told about it by someone else...

The current study uses principles from Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 1987, 2008) to better account for the symbolic integration of gesture and speech. Drawing on data collected from language use, we examine the use of two attention-directing strategies that are expressed using gesture, beats and pointing. It has been noted that beats are often over...

Neste artigo é explorado o papel dos gestos no desenvolvimento das línguas de sinais. Usando dados da Língua Americana de Sinais (ASL), Língua de Sinais Catalã (CSL), Língua de Sinais Francesa (FSL) e Língua Italiana de Sinais (ISL), assim como fontes históricas que descrevem gestos na região mediterrânea, demonstro que o gesto entra no sistema lin...

Como as entidades são representadas em um discurso, em Libras ou em várias outras línguas de sinais conhecidas? Isso pode ser feito usando-se um substantivo, um nome próprio de uma entidade específica, um classificador (CL) ou através de uma ação construída (CA). Todas essas representações possuem suas características próprias, algumas análogas às...

Como as entidades são representadas em Libras? Uma entidade pode ser representada através de um nome (ou um substantivo), pelo sinal próprio de um ser específico, por uma deixis, pelo uso de um classificador (CL) ou uma ação construída (CA) no discurso. Essas representações têm características próprias, sendo algumas análogas ao uso em línguas orai...

Goldin-Meadow & Brentari (G-M&B) rely on a formalist approach to language, leading them to seek objective criteria by which to distinguish language and gesture. This results in the assumption that gradient aspects of signs are gesture. Usage-based theories challenge this view, maintaining that all linguistic units exhibit gradience. Instead, we pro...

These linguistics articles were commissioned by an editorial board as part of our former online-only review article series. We are offering them here as a freely available collection.

This paper presents a usage-based, cognitive grammar analysis of Place as a symbolic structure in signed languages. We suggest that many signs are better viewed as constructions in which schematic or specific formal properties are extracted from usage events alongside specific or schematic meaning. We argue that pointing signs are complex construct...

This handbook aims at offering an authoritative and state-of-the art survey of current approaches to the analysis of human languages, serving as a source of reference for scholars and graduate students. The main objective of the handbook is to provide the reader with a convenient means of comparing and evaluating the main approaches that exist in c...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

This article reports the results of a study of necessity and possibility modals in Brazilian Sign Language (Libras). The data discussed here mainly come from an interview carried out with a fluent deaf Libras signer. Our analysis suggests that the Libras modals we elicited have a lexical source with a more concrete meaning (Bybee 1994 et al.) and,...

In this paper we offer the first steps in a framework for unifying spoken language, signed language, and gesture. The framework is based on three existing theories: dynamic systems theory , cognitive grammar, and non-Cartesian approaches to cognitive neuroscience. Our article posits a human expressive ability, which we claim is based on the need of...

This chapter maintains that human languages emerge from purposeful human behavior, the most common of which are visible gestural behaviors. We further suggest that sign languages were probably the first human languages. These assertions are based on the observation that gestural communication is exhibited by all of the Hominoidea, the primate super...

Signed languages are natural human languages used by deaf people throughout the world as their native or primary language. The study of them provides insights into many of the long-standing questions pondered by linguists, such as the nature of duality patterning and the origin and evolution of the human language facility. The analysis of signed la...

Deaf people are commonly identified as a group by their disability or handicap. This pathological perspective regards deaf people as having a medical condition, the inability to hear. This perspective also denies the linguistic status of signed languages, regarding them as defective forms of spoken language. A more appropriate way to understand dea...

Background: routes from gesture to language In this chapter we examine the developmental routes by which gesture is codified into a linguistic system in the context of the natural signed languages of the deaf. We suggest that gestures follow two routes as they codify, and thus that signed languages provide evidence of how material which begins its...

This study examines the developmental routes by which gesture is codified into a linguistic system in the context of the natural signed languages of the deaf. I suggest that gestures follow two routes as they codify, and thus that signed languages provide evidence of how material which begins its developmental life external to the conventional ling...

The American architect Frank Lloyd Wright was once asked how he could conceive and oversee so many projects. He answered, “I can’t get them out fast enough.” Wright was not talking about buildings; he was talking about ideas. He couldn’t get his ideas out fast enough. Bill Stokoe also was an architect of ideas. Like Wright’s Falling-water, Stokoe’s...

The authors explain Stokoe’s seminal concept of semantic phonology and clarify some controversies concerning its application.

This book uses evidence from and about sign languages to explore the origins of language as we know it today. According to the model presented in this book, it is sign, not spoken languages, that is the original mode of human communication. The book demonstrates that modern language is derived from practical actions and gestures that were increasin...

Sherman Wilcox is professor of linguistics at the University of New Mexico. His research interests include the theoretical and applied study of signed languages. His theoretical work focuses on iconicity, gesture, and typological studies of signed languages. He is widely recognized as an advocate for academic acceptance of American Sign Language in...

The hypothesis that language began as a multimodal, gestural complex finds support in data from spoken languages on the connection between intonation and gesture, as well as from the process by which intonation becomes codified into grammar. Also, data from signed languages show a similar process at work, in which gestural elements become incorpora...

In this paper I explore the role of gesture in the development of signed languages. Using data from American Sign Language, Catalan Sign Language, French Sign Language, and Italian Sign Language, as well as historical sources describing gesture in the Mediterranean region, I demonstrate that gesture enters the linguistic system via two distinct rou...

Adopting the framework of cognitive grammar, I define cognitive iconicity as a special case in which the phonological and the semantic poles of a symbolic structure reside in the same region of conceptual space. One rea-son for the richness of iconic representation present in signed languages is that the phonological pole of signs involves objects...

The Multimedia Dictionary of American Sign Language (MM- DASL) was conceived in the late 1980s as a melding of the pioneering work in American Sign Language (ASL) lexicography that William C. Stokoe and his colleagues had carried out decades earlier and the newly emerging computer technologies that were integrating the use of graphical user-interfa...

This commentary discusses the dynamic systems (DS) approach to communication over an information-processing (IP) model. The commenters suggest that the authors of the target article, in their treatment of the issue, do not identify the central failing of the IP model. Further, it is suggested that the DS approach should include examination of mecha...

Sign Language Studies 1.4 (2001) 333-343 Cole Porter Scholars throughout the centuries have tried to solve the mystery of language; it has made a fool out of many. William C. Stokoe was not one of them. One of the enduring mysteries is the nature of signed languages. From the time of the Milan Conference in 1880, when educators made such foolish st...

“Clarity, concern and comprehensiveness of the kind presented here is rare and exciting. A small gem.� --Newswaves “This second edition of the work remains by far the best wok of its type. It is cogent, well written, and provides a useful and important foundation for those interested in teaching ASL. It should also be of interest t...

This book proposes a radical alternative to dominant views of the evolution of language, and in particular the origins of syntax. The authors argue that manual and vocal communication developed in parallel, and that the basic elements of syntax are intrinsic to gesture. They draw on evidence from areas such as primatology, anthropology, and linguis...

One of the most crucial areas of education - the development of oral language and the acquisition of literacy - is examined here with an effective combination of theory and practice. The sociocultural perspective is illustrated through descriptions of learning by populations usually neglected in treatments of literacy: American Sign Language Users,...

This paper introduces a gestural theory for the origin of syntax, certainly one of the most difficult questions in the study of language origins. This proposal recognizes both visible and vocal gestures as having an evolutionary role but suggests that visible gestures played a special role in the emergence of syntax. The fundamental kernal of synta...

The Multimedia Dictionary of American Sign Language (MM-DASL) is a Macintosh application designed to function as a bilingual (ASL-English) dictionary. It presents ASL signs in full-motion digital video using Apple's QuickTime technology. Major functions of the application include the capability to search for ASL signs by entering English words; the...

This panel will start to build the bridge between behavioral scientists who know deaf communities worldwide, their languages and cultures, and experts in technical disciplines relating to computers and human interfaces.

Writing is a technology which for many centuries has supported the construction of dictionaries of spoken languages. Recently, writing systems for. signed languages have been created, making possible the development of signed language dictionaries. Print media have not been entirely successful in making signed language dictionaries accessible to la...

Despite rapid growth in the field of educational interpreting little is known about the formal training of educational interpreters. This gap in the research is the focus of this study. A questionnaire was sent to the directors of 50 interpreter training programs nationwide asking for information about their course work in educational interpreting...

A review of research and theory on the structure of signed and spoken languages explores the relationship between the two language types and how the study of signed languages can inform researchers about the human capacity for language. (29 references) (CB)

A cultural model of deafness is offered as an alternative to more popular pathological models. The cultural model attempts to describe the experiences of a deaf child as enculturation into a deaf world- to see the world from the deaf child's point of view. The implications of this view on social, cognitive, and linguistic development are explored t...

Although American Sign Language (ASL) has a long and rich history in America and scholarly research on ASL is in its third decade, ASL has been slow to garner any degree of status in the academic community, although some higher education institutions are beginning to consider ASL for their foreign-language curriculum. (CB)

The systematic confounding and belittling of deaf people's language systems have negatively affected their language and learning skills. Deaf individuals must recognize this form of oppression and their own personal power by taking control of research and study in this field. (CB)

1. An incidence of one person born deaf in every 155 (0.00645) is certainly high, but the ratio Groce gives for the country at large in the nineteenth century is low, and the precision implied by the denominator, “one American in every 5,728,” (0.0001745) is misleading at best. With the usual estimates at one per one or two thousand, one in nearly...

Discusses the responses of over 100 US colleges and universities to a survey regarding their policy on accepting American Sign Language (ASL) as meeting the foreign language requirement. While some accept ASL, most do not because they do not consider it a foreign language, nor deafness a culture. (SED)

Describes the details of a semantic extension of the American Sign Language lexical item "stuck," as it was used during the 1981-82 school year at a U.S. high school. Sees this semantic extension as indicative of poor communication between teacher and students at the high school. (SED)