المستخلص: |
Sign language was thought to be a mere pantomime of spoken language. One of the first figures to see signing as a legitimate language was a Gallaudet English professor, Dr. William C. Stokoe, Jr., who helped the deaf to realize that their signs constitute a unique and fully developed language. Stokoe (1960) developed a system for describing signs at the level of form and formulated phonological parameters for signs, namely handshape, movement, and place of articulation. Stokoe compared the values of these parameters to phonemes, but he coined the term ‘chereme’ (from the Greek word for ‘hand’) instead. Each of these parameters has a finite number of values. He demonstrated that sign language has a structure that can correspond to the phonological level. Structure of sign language consists of a finite list of meaningless units that combine to form lexical items of the language. This paper is an attempt to investigate sign language study throughout history and abolish the misconceptions held about it. It is an introductory study aimed at introducing the reader to sign language as a natural language acquired and used by the deaf. The paper also presents basic terms and concepts used in investigating sign language.
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