Knowledge of Language: Perspectives from Sign and Gesture Studies

Endre Begby (Simon Fraser University)

Abstract:

Recent and emerging discoveries in Sign and Gesture studies put serious pressure on the widespread idea that we can model a subject’s knowledge of a language in terms of their knowledge of a well-defined set of rules governing, among other things, the grammar, semantics, and phonology of that language. First, I point out that all extant Sign languages are historically recent creations, which have emerged spontaneously (though gradually) from patterns of presumptively non-linguistic gestural communication among Deaf people. I argue that there is no unique point in their history at which these gestural systems would have transitioned to become “languages proper” (even as they are, indisputably, languages by now). Second, I point out that speech, no less than Sign, continues to functionally incorporate non-categorical “gestural” complements in both semantic and grammatical roles, pointing toward a conception of language – in any form – as a “multimodal” phenomenon. 

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