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Historiographia Linguistica
Vol. 28:1/2 (2001) ► pp.143–186

William Stokoe and the discipline of sign language linguistics

| University of Washington,
The 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.
Published online: 13 June 2002
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https://doi.org/10.1075/hl.28.1.10mcb
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