Abstract
Philosophers are often beholden to a picture of language as a largely static, well-defined structure which is handed over from generation to generation by an arduous process of learning: language, on this view, is something that we are given, and that we can make use of, but which we play no significant role in creating ourselves. This picture is often maintained in conjunction with the idea that several distinctively human cognitive capacities could only develop via the language acquisition process, as thus understood. This paper argues that the phenomenon of homesign, i.e., spontaneous gesture systems devised by deaf children for the purpose of communicating with their non-signing peers, can shed valuable empirical light on these convictions. Contrary to grounding assumptions of Wittgensteinian, Gricean, and Peircean approaches to language, homesign shows how core properties of language—including semantic properties—can be built from the ground up in idiosyncratic ways to serve the communicative needs of individuals.
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Notes
James (1892) revisits the question, adding further testimony in support of the conclusion.
See Burge (2010), Part II, for extensive documentation—and rebuttal—of the philosophical idea that even so fundamental a capacity as perception might depend on acquired language.
If this seems surprising, we should bear in mind that it was not until the publication of Stokoe (1960) that even ASL and similar conventionalized sign systems would come to be recognized as full-blown natural languages. See Goldin-Meadow and Brentari (2015) for an account of this development. For accounts of the cultural history of the deaf communities, up to and including the recognition of sign as language, see Sacks (1989) and Ree (1999).
See Goldin-Meadow (2003).
Goldin-Meadow (2003: 111–112).
Thus, it should come as no surprise that one persistent source of interest in homesign concerns its status as evidence for innate grammatical abilities (see, e.g., Chomsky 1988: 39; Jackendoff 1995: 129–130). After all, these children have never been functionally exposed to any language, so it would seem that whatever grammatical abilities they evince must be innate. This conclusion is controversial, however: for useful contrasting perspectives, see Botha (2007), Tomasello (2008) and Amstrong and Wilcox (2011). Goldin-Meadow (2003: ch. 18) sensibly takes a more cautious approach to the question, substituting a notion of innateness in terms of genetic transmission for one of innateness in terms of developmental resilience: resilient properties of language are simply those that manifest under adverse and favorable developmental conditions alike. Thus, rudimentary grammatical abilities are certainly innate, but not necessarily in any way that would satisfy more expansive genetic accounts of language, such as one might associate with Chomsky (1986) or Pinker (1994).
Wittgenstein (1953).
See Kripke (1982) and McDowell (1984) for further variations on the theme. We might also note that while this line of reasoning clearly draws inspiration from what is often referred to as Wittgenstein’s private language argument, most subsequent developments of the theme are not directed against private languages per se (a language which only the speaker could understand), but rather against what is sometimes termed a “solitary language,” i.e., a language which only one person ever spoke in fact. (On this, see, e.g., Goldfarb 1985: 480). Homesign would clearly not constitute a private language, but it might well constitute a solitary language.
Sperber and Wilson (1986) and Carston (2002). I should add that what I am reconstructing here is a possible appropriation of Relevance Theory to the problem at hand. I am not supposing that prominent Relevance Theorists would necessarily approve of the appropriation, or, for that matter, be inclined to resist a semantic account of homesign.
See also Carston (2002: 46–47).
Even so, it is not a trivial matter how homesigners can come to be in the cognitive position to form the appropriately reflexive communicative intentions underlying speaker meaning in the first place. I will return to this issue in my final section.
For details, see Carrigan and Coppola (2012).
Though see Carrigan and Coppola (2012) for an account of the limitations on this process.
For overviews of this development, see Senghas (1995), Kegl et al. (1999), Morford and Kegl (2000) and Brentari and Coppola (2012). Although the ISN may be unique in how rapidly it emerged, it is not alone among spontaneously developed sign languages: a recently discovered case is the Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language in Israel’s Negev Desert (see, e.g., Sandler et al. 2005; Senghas 2005, Fox 2007). Indeed, it is overwhelmingly likely that these processes will be set in motion whenever deaf people are allowed to congregate on their own terms for an appreciable amount of time.
The terminology is due to de Saussure (1916), but recognition of the phenomenon goes back at least to Plato’s Cratylus. Unfortunately, however, the literature tends to conflate the properties of arbitrariness and conventionality. For illustration, consider Lyons (1977: 100): “Saussure (1916) made what he called the ‘arbitrariness of the linguistic sign’ (that is to say, the conventionality of the relationship between form and meaning) one of the most basic principles of his whole theory.” But to treat the two notions as though they were identical is clearly mistaken; in fact they are not even co-extensional. Proof: from any arbitrary mapping of words to meanings (say, that of the English lexicon), we can generate another by random reassignment. If the first mapping was conventional, the second is clearly not. But it is no less arbitrary than the original mapping.
See Ree (1999: ch. 13) for an account of these views and their historical background.
Though I will not pursue the matter here, I wish to register that I have serious reservations about Bermudez’s reading of the empirical literature on homesign, specifically regarding the evidence for syntactic and morphological structure. The main thrust of Bermudez’s book, however, is that one class of crucially important and distinctively human cognitive abilities—metarepresentational abilities—could only develop through the acquisition of a conventional public language, and so must presumably remain unavailable to homesigners. On this specific point, I believe contrary evidence can be found, inter alia, in Butcher et al. (1991: 329).
Crudely, they are not referential phenomena, in the sense that so captivates philosophical semanticists, but more like sentential operators (“yes,” “no,” “maybe”). Moreover, these may be among the relatively few conventionalized gestures that the children adopt from their social environment, and so fall outside the scope of the present argument.
See Frishberg (1975).
See, e.g., Tomasello (2008: 147).
For an overview, see Dale and Crain-Thoreson (1993).
See Petitto (1987).
See Camp (2007: 156–157), for illuminating remarks on the informational richness of analog representation as contrasted with linguistic representation.
Goldin-Meadow (2003: 87–89).
See Tomasello (2008: 111–117).
Goldin-Meadow (2003: 138).
Goldin-Meadow (2003: 74).
Another term is “interchangeability” (e.g., Hockett 1960). It is obviously tempting, though probably mistaken, to assume that bidirectionality and conventionality are simply two names for the same property. It is well known that comprehension and production are dissociable aspects of language, and many of us are quite capable of understanding utterances in languages that we do not speak. And so, we cannot rule out that homesign communication can at some point be described as conventional, even though it remains largely non-bidirectional.
See, for instance, the recent study by Carrigan and Coppola (2012), which also reveals startling limitations to caregivers’ comprehension of homesign gestures: ASL signers who have had no previous interactions with adult homesigning subjects are shown to have better comprehension of the subjects’ gestures than do the subjects’ own mothers.
For a useful perspective, see Richie et al. (2014).
Though see Morgan and Kegl (2006), Pyers and Senghas (2009) and Gagne and Coppola (2014) for evidence suggesting that adult homesigners (and other language-delayed deaf subjects) may have impaired Theory of Mind-abilities, as shown by their difficulties in passing false belief tests. I have some reservations about the significance of these findings, and hope to address the issue in future work.
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Acknowledgments
This paper has been in preparation for a long time, and I have incurred a number of debts of gratitude along the way. For their input and encouragement at various stages, I would like to thank Holly K. Andersen, Josh Armstrong, Dorit Bar-On, Feisal Ben Hassel, Jim Bogen, Emma Borg, Elisabeth Camp, Eve Clark, Marie Coppola, Ingrid Lossius Falkum, Olav Gjelsvik, Martin Hahn, Daniel Harris, Nancy Hedberg, Emily Hodges, Jo-Jo Koo, Şeyda Özçalışkan, David Pereplyotchik, Paul Pietroski, Bjørn Ramberg, Georges Rey, Paula Rubio-Fernandez, Rob Stainton, Susan G. Sterrett, and Nicole Wyatt, as well as audiences at Simon Fraser University, the 2012 meeting of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology, the 2012 meeting of the Western Canadian Philosophical Association, the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature (University of Oslo), Ruhr-University Bochum, and the University of Bergen, and students in PHIL 806 (Spring 2013) and PHIL 344 (Spring 2016) at Simon Fraser University. Special thanks are due to three anonymous referees for this journal. Early work on this paper was supported by a post-doctoral grant from the Research Council of Norway.
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Begby, E. Language from the Ground Up: A Study of Homesign Communication. Erkenn 82, 693–714 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-016-9839-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-016-9839-1