Against all expectations: encoding subjects and objects in a new language
Temas
Detalles
A good linguistic field workers bring to their task two sets of perfectly reasonable contradictory expectations. On the one hand, in true Bosnian tradition, they have trained themselves to be open-minded and not to impose preconceptions on the data. On the other, in more modern Chomskyan fashion, they know that description cannot be done in the absence of a theory and that the more articulated their theory the deeper the questions they can ask. The sign languages of the world that have been well studied resemble each other much more closely than do spoken languages that are unrelated to one another. Elsewhere we have argued that the newness of individual sign languages and the visual medium through wihich they are transmitted together make unrelated sign languages more similar to one another than spoken languages are. This means that sign language researchers, on first encounter with a language, come armed with fairly strong expectations.
En: D. Gerdts, J. Moore & M. Polinsky, (Eds.). "Hypothesis A/Hypothesis B: Linguistic Explorations in Honor of David M. Perlmutter".