Abstract:

Contributors to this fiftieth anniversary volume of SLS were asked to describe our early involvement at the beginning stages of sign language linguistics. I'll briefly summarize my engagement from 1970 to 1980 before probing a much more interesting question: What lay behind William Stokoe's own leap into this new territory? Remarkably for an outsider to the Deaf community, he later had profound effects on it. This article reexamines Stokoe's own personal development—and the value of a curious and determined man who asks the right questions rather than just accepting assumptions about how Deaf people communicate.

摘要：

SLS 五十周年纪念卷的撰稿人被要求描述我们在手语语言学的早期阶段的早期参与。在探讨一个更有趣的问题之前，我将简要总结一下我从 1970 年到 1980 年的经历：威廉·斯托科 (William Stokoe) 自己跨入这一新领域的背后是什么？对于聋人社区的局外人来说，值得注意的是，他后来对聋人社区产生了深远的影响。本文重新审视了斯托科自己的个人发展，以及一个好奇而坚定的人的价值，他提出正确的问题，而不是仅仅接受关于聋人如何沟通的假设。