Sign Language And Language Acquisition In Man And Ape

New Dimensions In Comparative Pedolinguistics

Fred C. C. Peng, Roger S Fouts, Duane M Rumbaugh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000311464
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume brings together recent research findings on sign language and primatology and offers a novel approach to comparative language acquisition. The contributors are anthropologists, psychologists, linguists, psycholinguists, and manual language experts. They present a lucid account of what sign language is in relation to oral language, and o

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Sign Language and Culture

Fred C. C. Peng

Introduction

The purpose of this presentation is the description in some detail of sign language and the culture of the deaf, a subject that has rarely been dealt with in anthropology. Sign Language is of great interest to me, because it not only represents a new dimension (perhaps a renewed one) in man's linguistic capabilities but also serves as a very useful tool to measure the similarities and differences of certain aspects of linguistic ability between man and ape (see also Chapter 8 in this volume). To achieve this purpose, I will divide the presentation into five sections: (1) historical account of language and culture; (2) erroneous views about sign language; (3) characteristics of sign language; (4) the deaf community in Japan; and (5) conclusion.

To avoid any possible confusion and to facilitate discussion that will follow in the course of my presentation, I shall ask the reader to keep in mind that for the most part the term "language" is synonymous with "oral language," unless specified otherwise, and that wherever necessary the term "oral language" will be used in contradistinction with "sign language."

Historical Account of Language and Culture

It seems to me that nowadays in anthropology, if not in linguistics as well, the proposition that language is a part of culture is taken for granted.

The term "culture" was in effect invented by Tylor (1874) for anthropology. Tylor's well-known definition of culture is: "that complex whole which includes knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society."

Students of anthropology will also realize that since Tylor's time cultural and social anthropologists have gradually moved from a definition of culture, that describes it as a more or less haphazard collection of traits, to one which emphasizes pattern and configuration. Kluckhohn and Kelly thus expressed this new concept of culture: "By culture we mean all those historically created designs for living, explicit and implicit, rational, irrational, and nonrational, which exist at any given time as potential guides for the behavior of men" (1945-97). Anthropologists have since Tylor used the term "culture" to cover everything in anthropology designated as archaeological, ethnographic, or even linguistic:

"It is clear that language is a part of culture; it is one of the many 'capabilities acquired by man as a member of society'" (Hoijer 1948:335).

"Language may no longer be conceived as something entirely distinct from other cultural systems but must rather be viewed as part of the whole and functionally related to it" (Hoijer 1953:554).

However, Voegelin dissents:

"Some writers jump... to either or both of the following conclusions: (1) that language is a part of culture, which is debatable; (2) that the techniques for analysis of language and culture are the same or closely similar — this is surely an error (Voegelin 1949a:36). It may well be that anthropologists who work exclusively in culture, and linguists innocent of culture theory espouse this view, if they think of it at all; those who attempt to work in both fields seem more apt to appreciate the distinction and to speak of language and culture rather than of language as a part of culture" (Voegelin 1949a:36 fn. 2).

The cultural anthropologist Opler replies:

"In fact, since I consider language (as do most linguists) to be a form of cultural activity and Voegelin does not, I suspect that I place even more importance on what informants say than he does" (Opler 19^9:U3).

To this Voegelin answers:

"If language can be best comprehended as being a part of culture (which it is, according to Tylor and those who follow his definition of culture, including Opler), then why is it necessary to identify a critic of a particular theory of culture as a linguist? Is this not another example of subscribing to a definition formally and then forgetting about the definition in actual discussion? If language were merely a part of culture, then linguists should be competent to discuss other parts of culture by virtue of their training in linguistics. We must admit that if a linguist can discuss problems in culture, it is by virtue of his being a student in culture, also, rather than by a transfer from linguistic training; and vice versa" (Voegelin 1949a:45).

Both sides have something to say. It is true that language is a part of culture, especially when we recognize that "language" is only the general norm of human speech activities, as was so wisely put forth by Malinowski a few decades ago (Peng 1975a:6); but it is also true that linguists who have not been trained in the theory of culture in general cannot be expected to be completely conversant with culture theory.

The argument of whether or not language is a part of culture may thus be said to stem from two sources: (1) a lack of agreement on what culture Is; and (2) a tendency to draw a strict parallel between a methodology and the substance to which such a methodology is applied.

In the first case, it seems clear that Voegelin and Opler did not agree on the definition of culture, although they might quote or refer to the same definition. This is shown in the following passage from Voegelin:

"If language were merely a part of culture, primates should be able to learn parts of human language as they actually do learn parts of human culture when prodded by Primatologists. No sub-human animal ever learns any part of human language — not even parrots. The fact that Polly wants a cracker is not taken by the parrot as part of a language is shown by the refusal of the bird to use part of the utterance as a frame (Polly wants a ...) with substitutions in the frame. (For the three dots, a speaker of a language would be able to say cracker or nut or banana or anything else wanted). As George Herzog has phrased this, imitative utterances of sub-human animals are limited to one morpheme; to the parrot, then, Polly wants a cracker is an unchangeable unit. From this point of view, we can generalize: an inescapable feature of all natural human languages is that they are capable of multi-morpheme utterances (1949:45).

Obviously, Voegelin's statement here implies that language has something that culture cannot cover, a fact that has been known for ages about language which may be called language creativity (i.e., producing new utterances by way of putting individual words together or of such transformations as deletion, substitution, and addition), although his illustration of substitution is only a small part of it. (I must quickly add that we should not lose sight of the fact that it is man, not "language," who has this kind of creativity.) Voegelin suggested that "To discuss this problem calls for a meeting of minds from both the culturist and linguistic camps" (1949b:45) (1).

The question of substitutability (or creavity in its broader sense defined above), however, is not limited to language, especially when we adhere to the point that it is man who exhibits creativity (and so do nonhuman primates). It follows that music or other form of art such as painting (which is also a part of culture) displays a similar feature. For instance, a jazz pianist can improvise passages and change them at will, as he plays the piano. And no one would deny that, according to Tylor's, Kluckhohn's, or even Linton's definition of culture (2), jazz music is a part of American culture.

In the second case, it seems to me that what Voegelin was saying is that if language is a part of culture, then the techniques for analysis of both must be the same or at least sufficiently similar, but since the techniques for analysis are not at all the same, irrespective of erroneous claims by some writers, language is therefore not a part of culture. The other side of the coin is that language is a part of culture, but since linguists use a different technique for its analysis, linguists are not culturalists and, therefore, cannotbe expected to know much about culture or the problems related to it.

This attitude pointed out by Voegelin was shared by some prominent anthropologists at that time, as may be evidenced by Linton's reasoning for excluding linguistics from the scope and aims of anthropology:

"Turning to the field of cultural anthropology and its subsciences, we find that the subscience of linguistics is, at present, the most isolated and self contained. The study of languages can be and largely has been carried on with little relation to other aspects of human activity ... That linguistics ultimately will be of great value for the understanding of human behavior and especially of human thought processes can hardly be doubted. However, work along these lines has barely begun and linguistics is still unable to make any great contribution toward the solution of our current problems. For that reason it has been ignored in the present volume" (1945b:7-8).

The controversy here can hardly be exaggerated. But I am of the opinion that if language is a part of culture, even though the techniques employed for its analysis are different, the sheer difference in technique alone does not automatically give rise to the assumption that linguistics is totally unable to contribute to the solution of problems in anthropology, so long as the substance to which the techniques are applied is not tampered with and so long as claims for each technique do not exceed the success it can achieve (3).

On the other hand, however, there is some truth in the opinion expressed by Linton about linguistics, a fact that is being painfully experienced now more than thirty years later by many contemporary linguists, simply because linguistics has moved farther and farther away from its relevance to man and his environments, so much so that it can no longer be recognized in some circles as linguistics (4). I should also point out that en route to alienation from the proper domain of language and culture, there was and may still be a time during which certain practitioners (those from MIT in particular) preferred to call their linguistics a branch of psychology and that still others so practice their linguistics as to make it devoid of human interaction which, because the substance has been tampered with, is better called mathematical linguistics, symbolic logic, or computational linguistics, rather than linguistics per se (Peng 1975a).

As early as 1951, linguists (then structuralists) were already in the process of divorcing linguistics from anthropology, albeit with mixed feelings, as may be seen in an interesting statement by Voegelin himself:

"The new secretary of the Linguistic Society of America would define linguistics not merely as a branch of anthropology but, more specifically, as a branch of 'cultural anthropology'; another linguist, cited in the same article, speaks of linguistics as a branch of, or rather, a kind of mathematics" (1951:364).

I should add that when the MIT group came up with something that really looked like mathematics a few years later, the structuralists were caught quite unprepared. Since the time of Neogrammarians, linguists have had a tendency to claim more for their methodology than it may deserve. However, I do not wish to suggest that mathematical techniques or some other tools must not be used in dealing with language as a part of culture or that if such a technique is employed to handle language, language is no longer a part of culture, a proposition that was precisely the source of argument stated earlier. What I am saying is that so long as the substance with which we are concerned is not tampered with (in our case, if language is not taken out of its human and environmental contexts), any method or technique can be used as long as the technique is not elevated into a kind of intellectual fetish.

Perhaps an example is needed to illustrate the essence of my word of caution. For instance, the transformational-generative paradigm, which flourished in the 1960s but has since declined, is a data-processing technique. But its proponents, encouraged by the tendency of over-claim in linguistics, claimed it explained or accounted for human mental activity; it was even said to characterize language acquisition stages or the ideal hearer-speaker's ability that is supposed to underlie some kind of language universals, even though there is no empirical support nor evidence for its feasibility. The following is a case in point of this over-claim that prevailed throughout the 1960s:

"... It is now proposed that, first, children are born with a biologically based, innate capacity for language acquisition; secondly, the best guess as to the nature of the innate capacity is that it takes the form of linguistic universals; thirdly, the best guess as to the nature of linguistic universals is that they consist of what are currently the basic notions of Chomskian transformational grammar. Metaphorically speaking, a child is now born with a copy of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax tucked away somewhere inside. Given the present state of knowledge regarding innate capacity and language universals, the above seem defensible guesses" (5) (Fraser 1966: 116, paraphrase of McNeill 1966).

My whole point here (cf. Peng 1975b and 1976a) is that there is an urgent need to bring linguistics back to anthropology and treat language in its broad sense (i.e., not limited to oral language) within the bounds of culture, whereby man and his environment in connection with his linguistic behavior should once again become the focus of attention. It is a good thing that the tide is changing in this direction, as may be evidenced by recent activities in sociolinguistics, pedolinguistics, and neurolinguistics.

Some Erroneous Views About Sign Language

Erroneous views about sign language have come not so much from laymen but from professional linguists who stated these views in the name of science. The most serious error may stem from ignorance about sign language and conceit about oral language. This attitude is extended to nonhuman primates, when man compares himself with ape: "For a variety of reasons, certainly including ignorance and possibly conceit," say Eimerl and DeVore, "man has always had a tendency to consider his own qualities as being unique" (1974:16).

To substantiate this, a more general argument between de Saussure and Whitney should be mentioned (cf. Peng 1975b: 13)- In this dispute, de Saussure, for all his contributions to linguistics, took, in my opinion, a wrong turn regarding les image visuelles and dismisssed too quickly Whitney's view as trop absolue (too extreme). Here is what he said:

"Ainsi pour Whitney, qui assimile la. langue à une institution sociale ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• About the Editor and Authors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Sign Language and Culture
• 2 Code and Culture
• 3 The American Sign Language Lexicon and Guidelines for the Standardization and Development of Technical Signs
• 4 Language Acquisition in Apes and Children
• 5 Sign Language in Chimpanzees: Implications of the Visual Mode and the Comparative Approach
• 6 Language Skills, Cognition, and the Chimpanzee
• 7 Linguistic Capabilities of a Lowland Gorilla
• 8 Linguistic Potentials of Nonhuman Primates
• Comments and Remarks