William Stokoe and the discipline of sign language linguistics

Abstract

SummaryThe first modern linguistic analysis of a signed language was published in 1960 – William Clarence Stokoe’s (1919–2000)Sign Language Structure. Although the initial impact of Stokoe’s monograph on linguistics and education was minimal, his work formed a solid base for what was to become a new field of research: American Sign Language (ASL) Linguistics. Together with the work of those that followed (in particular Ursula Bellugi and colleagues), Stokoe’s ground-breaking work on the structure of ASL has led to an acceptance of signed languages as autonomous linguistic systems that exhibit the complex structure characteristic of all human languages.