The Authors' Hypothesis That Sign Languages Emerged As Creolised Paralanguages

Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 210):

Even more sensitive might be consideration of the genesis of sign languages around the world, and the possibility of a pidgin/creole continuum involving the range of speakers who had the opportunity to learn sign in childhood as a ‘native language’ and those who came to it at various stages later on in life as a first or additional language. How might such studies bear on the hypothesis that sign languages emerged as creolised paralanguages among communities of deaf speakers?

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, Sign languages are language, with a content plane stratified into semantics and lexicogrammar. The ontogenesis of Sign is the ontogenesis of language.

A creolised paralanguage would be a pidgin paralanguage that has become a native paralanguage. A pidgin paralanguage would be a simplified paralanguage used by people who do not share a common paralanguage.

The authors' hypothesis here is that Sign languages emerge as the nativisation of a simplified accompaniment to language (paralanguage) in communities of deaf speakers who did not previously share a common accompaniment to language.

Deaf signers might be tempted to similarly hypothesise that spoken languages emerged as creolised vocal paralanguage among communities of hearing people. In this scenario, hearing signers, who did not previously have a shared vocalised accompaniment to Sign, created a simplified vocalised accompaniment, and when this paralanguage was learned by the next generation, it became spoken language.

Confusing Functional Syntagmatic Relations With Formal Constituency

Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 209):

Working from a functional paradigm we of course have to approach the relation of ‘sign languages’ to one another differently. In essence this means adopting a paradigmatic perspective and formalising their meaning potential as far as possible in system networks specifying the relation of one sign (in Saussure’s sense of the term) to another. 

The crucial question we then need to ask is whether meanings combine with one another. …The paralinguistic systems we describe in this volume do combine ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings but apparently without involving syntagmatic relations (i.e. parts configuring as wholes).

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, the Saussurean sign includes both content ('signified') and expression ('signifier'), whereas system networks specify relations within one or the other, e.g. lexicogrammar or phonology. For some of Martin's misunderstandings of Saussure, see:

• Misunderstanding What Saussure Was "Struggling Against"
• Mistaking Saussure's Rejected Model For Saussure's 'Sign' [1]
• Mistaking Saussure's Rejected Model For Saussure's 'Sign' [2]
• Misunderstanding The Saussurean Sign
• The "Non-Privileging" Of Either Level Of Symbolic Abstraction
• Misunderstanding Saussure's Coins Example
• Misunderstanding The Bonding Of Signified And Signifier And The Relation Of Form To Substance
• Seriously Misunderstanding The Sign In Relation To Linguistics And Semiotics

[2] To be clear, this confuses structural relations along the syntagmatic axis (e.g. Pretonic ^ Tonic) with the part-whole relations of the rank scale (e.g. feet (parts) as constituents of a tone group (whole)).