Power Justin M
Department of Linguistics, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, United States.
Front Psychol. 2022 Mar 9;13:818753. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.818753. eCollection 2022.
In contrast to scholars and signers in the nineteenth century, William Stokoe conceived of American Sign Language (ASL) as a unique linguistic tradition with roots in nineteenth-century , a conception that is apparent in his earliest scholarship on ASL. Stokoe thus contributed to the theoretical foundations upon which the field of sign language historical linguistics would later develop. This review focuses on the development of sign language historical linguistics since Stokoe, including the field's significant progress and the theoretical and methodological problems that it still faces. The review examines the field's development through the lens of two related problems pertaining to how we understand sign language relationships and to our understanding of cognacy, as the term pertains to signs. It is suggested that the theoretical notions underlying these terms do not straightforwardly map onto the historical development of many sign languages. Recent approaches in sign language historical linguistics are highlighted and future directions for research are suggested to address the problems discussed in this review.
与19世纪的学者和手语使用者不同，威廉·斯托科将美国手语（ASL）视为一种独特的语言传统，其根源可追溯到19世纪，这一观念在他最早关于美国手语的学术研究中就很明显。因此，斯托科为手语历史语言学领域后来得以发展的理论基础做出了贡献。这篇综述聚焦于自斯托科以来手语历史语言学的发展，包括该领域取得的重大进展以及它仍然面临的理论和方法问题。这篇综述通过两个相关问题的视角审视该领域的发展，这两个问题涉及我们如何理解手语关系以及我们对同源性的理解（就该术语与手语相关而言）。有人认为，这些术语背后的理论概念并不能直接对应到许多手语的历史发展。文中突出了手语历史语言学的近期研究方法，并提出了未来的研究方向，以解决本综述中讨论的问题。
