From Music to Signs: The Making of a Sign Language Linguist

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• From Music to Signs:The Making of a Sign Language Linguist
• Sherman Wilcox (bio)

Although my introduction to sign linguistics took place in a university environment, it was more through personal experience than purely academic study. It was never my goal to become a linguist, much less a sign linguist. I was a music major in college, 1965–1969, at the University of Michigan and Indiana University. After a four-year stint playing oboe in the Air Force Band in Illinois during the Vietnam War, I decided on a change of career and scenery. I moved to Albuquerque, enrolled at the University of New Mexico (UNM), and began working on an MA in special education. In one class, a woman talked to us about the education of deaf children. She signed, and I was immediately fascinated. After class I asked her where I could learn sign language. She told me that a deaf woman, Phyllis Fletcher, was teaching "manual communication" at UNM. I took the class, fell in love with my teacher, married her, and thus began the journey.

Soon thereafter, I began a doctoral program in educational linguistics at UNM. At the same time, Phyllis and I began working to develop a bachelor of science degree program in signed language interpreting. At the time, in the early 1980s, it was a struggle! We proposed a course in fingerspelling. A member of the university curriculum committee contacted someone at the local school for the deaf about this and was told the idea was silly—one only needed to be given a fingerspelling card. Interpreting education became an important [End Page 284] thread in my professional development. I learned and taught our students that interpreters don't transfer words from one language to another, they actively make meaning. Words are not containers of meaning, they are merely cues for the cognitive construction of meaning. This was one precursor to my theoretical approach to sign linguistics.

During my doctoral program, I was fortunate to be mentored by Dr. Vera John-Steiner, a scholar of Lev Vygotsky. From Vera, I learned the importance of the interactive function of language. She introduced me to the work of another Russian scholar of language, Mikhail Bakhtin, who wrote that "language for the individual consciousness lies on the borderline between oneself and the other … language is half someone else's." Although I was still quite new to the field of linguistics, I began to sense that, for some approaches, language is about individuals producing language in isolation, and grammar is about generating structure. It seemed to me that if interaction is fundamental and language is "half someone else's" then comprehension is fundamental. Again, I saw making sense, not only of others but also more essentially of the world we experience through our perceptual and motor interactions, as the key to how language works.

During this time, I taught in a mainstream deaf education program. As a result of observing the struggles deaf students faced trying to communicate with their hearing teachers, I wrote my first article, "STUCK in School" (figure 1 from Wilcox 1984) and submitted it to Sign Language Studies. With my submission I included a humble letter to William Stokoe, excusing myself for writing directly to such an esteemed scholar. I was amazed when he not only accepted the paper for review but also wrote a reply that has stayed with me over the years. I still have the letter (yes, that was back when we corresponded on paper). He said, "Life's too short and our area of interest too small to waste time on formalities. I'm delighted to hear from you directly." Stokoe's response was my first lesson in mentorship: skip the formalities; let's get to work (figure 2).

Because the interpreting degree at UNM required students to take American Sign Language (ASL), and because our students were also required to take a foreign language, our students encouraged us to petition the university to accept ASL in fulfillment of the foreign [End Page 285]

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View full resolution Figure 1.

Cartoon "Stuck in School" by the deaf artist Betty Miller (from Wilcox 1984).

language requirement...