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and Hockett (1960) called duality of patterning, and which the latter identified as the last of his thirteen design features of human languages. Duality of patterning, which is found in all known spoken languages and not in the natural communication systems of animals, is the existence in a linguistic system of two lev... |
Because every known spoken language has a dual system, it is tempting to believe that a language cannot exist without duality of patterning. Pinker and Jackendoff (2005:212) explain that "A combinatorial sound system is a solution to the problem of encoding a large number of concepts (tens of thousands) into a far smal... |
The manual-visual modality could have an impact on the number of holistic signals that could be amassed in a communication system before duality becomes necessary. First of all, the manual-visual modality more easily accommodates iconically motivated signs, while the vocal-auditory modality significantly restricts the ... |
Because sign languages are transmitted in the visual medium and are, in some respects, iconically motivated, one might not expect sign languages to have phonology. Instead, each sign might be a holistic, meaningful unit, precluding the existence of a meaningless level of structure. But for Stokoe, a primary argument fo... |
The question of how a phonological level arises in language has never been addressed on an empirical basis, and we offer the work reported here as a first step. In a new language, we observe unexpected variance on the one hand, and budding formal regularity on the other. We use these phenomena to frame issues to be add... |
We will argue in this article that Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) proves Hockett to have been correct about the relative timetable for the emergence of dual patterning. ABSL is new and, like other sign languages, it is communicated through sight rather than through sound, possibly lending the system more option... |
According to Hockett (1960) and to Pinker and Jackendoff (2005), duality of patterning arises because the message set gets larger and larger, making discrimination between signals more and more difficult, especially in noisy conditions. Thus, duality is seen as a product of interaction among individuals in a community ... |
The general outline of the paper is as follows. Taking examples mainly from Israeli Sign Language (ISL), the language used by the majority of Israel's 10,000-member deaf community, we begin in Sect. 1 by demonstrating what it means for a sign language to have phonology. 5 We then go on to argue in Sect. 2 that ABSL, a ... |
The single most influential finding in sign language studies was Stokoe's (1960) discovery that American Sign Language (ASL) has phonology, which he called cherology (from Classical Greek [xeir] 'hand') because the signs are produced with the hands. His work focused mainly on minimal pairs, showing that each of the maj... |
Once the floodgate was opened, research on various aspects of sign language structure surged through, investigating the morphology, syntax, and, of special interest to us here, phonology of ASL and other sign languages. In the subsequent sections, we sketch some of the main findings in sign language phonology, to demon... |
To say that there is a phonological level of structure means that there are discrete and meaningless formational elements that work together in a system (like Morse code dots and dashes). The existence of minimal pairs-meaningful words distinguished by such elements drawn from a finite list-is strong evidence for a sys... |
One of the characteristics of organization at the level of meaningless formational units is the fact that the elements of the system are constrained in terms of the ways in which they may co-occur. Some of these constraints are language-specific, and others are general. For example, the way in which sounds are ordered ... |
7 See Sandler and Lillo-Martin (2006), Chap. 9 for a treatment of the sequential aspects of sign language structure. 8 Much of the discussion that follows relies on details of the Hand Tier model (Sandler 1989; Sandler and Lillo-Martin 2006). Other models that differ in various ways have been proposed (e.g., Liddell an... |
All sign language lexicons contain both one-handed and two-handed signs. Two robust constraints on two-handed mono-morphemic signs are the Dominance Condition, and the Symmetry Condition (Battison 1978). The Dominance Condition holds for two-handed signs in which the dominant hand moves and the nondominant hand functio... |
The domain of most of the constraints described is the simplex lexical sign, supporting the claim that the constraints are phonological rather than merely motoric (phonetic). They can be violated when more than one morpheme is combined, even if combined in a single, still 'pronounceable' syllable. 13, 14 For example, t... |
Phonological alternations provide crucial evidence for a phonological level of structure, since they make reference to formational properties of sublexical elements that bear no meaning. The pattern of assimilation in lexical compounds in ASL and ISL indicates that this is a (morpho-)phonological process rather than si... |
Assimilation of handshape without orientation is not attested in any of the set of lexicalized compounds studied. 15 For this reason, Sandler (1987 Sandler (, 1989 following Clements (1985) for spoken language, argues for a hierarchical representation of these feature classes, with orientation dominated by handshape. T... |
The Al-Sayyid Bedouin group was founded about 200 years ago in the Negev region of present-day Israel. According to folkore, the first settler in the area migrated there from Egypt and was a fallaah, 'peasant', not a Bedouin. Today, his descendants live as Bedouin and are regarded as Bedouin. The group is now in its se... |
In the fifth generation since the founding of the community (about 75 years ago), four deaf siblings were born into the community. In the next two generations, deafness spread in many other families as well. The number of deaf individuals in the community today is estimated at about 120-150. The particular distribution... |
It is certainly not obvious a priori that a sign language should have a phonological level of structure, and, though it is hard to believe now almost 50 years later, Stokoe was initially ridiculed for his claim that ASL does. Considering the fact that many signs are iconically motivated, it was assumed, tacitly or expl... |
In the naïve expectation that vocabulary would be similar across a small, insular community, we aimed to get a larger list of vocabulary items by using partly different stimuli for different groups of signers. What we did not expect was the wide range of variation that we found, both lexical and formational. The data w... |
Fortunately, we have a good idea of the traces we would expect phonology to leave if it were indeed present in ABSL, and the traces are absent. First of all, we have encountered no minimal pairs in our study of the language to date. While we can't deny the logical possibility that minimal pairs are there but evading us... |
Let us take as a first example the sign for an everyday object, LEMON. In a simple picture naming task, signers signed LEMON with different handshapes, orientations, and internal movements. For instance, one signer produces the sign in the space in front of the signer's torso with a rubbing movement of the index finger... |
A third signer uses three fingers, but the location is next to the mouth instead of in neutral space in front of the signers. Several other versions occur in the data. We were struck by the amount and types of variation we found in our data, variation that we would not expect in the established sign languages with whic... |
The sign TEA was signed with three different handshapes across eight signers with the same sign for TEA. These are shown in Fig. 12. At first glance, the signs looked identical: the location is in front of the mouth, the palm orientation is comfortably toward the contralateral side, and the movement is a rotation of th... |
In DOG, major body areas that are contrastive places of articulation in other sign languages vary freely in ABSL. Figure 13 shows the head and the torso (or neutral space) as variants. Orientation, considered a feature class dominated by the Hand Configuration category (Sandler 1987), can also be contrastive in establi... |
The sign for DOG, for which only two variants are shown in Fig. 13, is a good example of the kind of formational variation we encountered in this language. Of eleven signers, ten used the same lexical item, representing the barking mouth of a dog with the hand or hands. One signer represented a dog's ears and paws, thi... |
Across the exemplars of DOG in ABSL, there was a great deal of variation. The sign typically involved a repeated curving movement of the fingers, from laxly extended to curved. Yet one signer selected only three fingers; one closed the fingers (in an 'O' shape); some used two hands facing one another and some two hands... |
For example, while most ABSL signers select all fingers for DOG, one, signer A, selects only 3. Major body area, another high level distinction, varies from head to Fig. 15 Hierarchies of feature classes for Hand Configuration and Location (following Sandler 1989) torso to nondominant hand. The type of movement varies ... |
In addition to variation in the fingers selected like those in the examples of LEMON in Fig. 11, ABSL sign productions are anomalous in another way as well. As explained, in established sign languages, the same fingers must be involved in a sign, obeying the Selected Finger Constraint (Mandel 1981). In other words, if ... |
In general, ABSL showed the most variation; ISL was next; and ASL showed the least amount of variation in sign production, leading Israel to suggest that social factors such as language age and size of the community contribute to convergence on phonological categories in a language. Taking the category of hand configur... |
When tokens were compared on a global measure of variation-that is, with variation in any category counted as a different variant of the sign-then the differences were clear. ASL has the lowest amount of variation (2.07 variants per lexical item), ISL follows with a higher level of variation (4.67 variants per lexical ... |
In sum, we find three kinds of evidence for the claim that this new language has not yet converged on a set of abstract, meaningless phonological categories. The first red flag we noticed is a dearth of minimal pairs in our data so far. However, it has been observed that there may be fewer minimal pairs in sign languag... |
ABSL syntax within clauses is highly regular. In a study of second generation signers, we found that the constituent order is quite rigidly SOV and the order of elements within phrases is head-modifier. These relations necessarily imply hierarchical structure, as subject, object, and verb belong to a clause, object and... |
The language has developed a particular type of compounding or affixation to specify the size and shape of objects. For example, TELEVISION +'small rectangular object' refers to a remote control device; WRITE + 'long thin object' refers to a pen. We will have more to say about these interesting forms in Sect. 4.1. Ther... |
Our claim is that ABSL as a language does not yet have a fully developed phonological system. However, a fine-grained examination of the sign productions in Al-Sayyid uncovers a blueprint for its development. Pinpointing the kernels of phonology in this way may be informative for the evolution of phonology more general... |
Our larger study on which this article is based relies mainly on 128 elicited items produced by 23 signers in response to pictures. In these elicitations, a large number of handshapes were recorded, pictured in Table 3. Many of these are uncommon or infrequent in the inventories of familiar sign languages, and would th... |
What can we learn from this? Two hypotheses present themselves. The first is that the shape found most often is an unspecified one in the handshape space of which the two in Fig. 18 are phonetic variants. The second hypothesis is that this Table 3 Handshapes observed in ABSL. For each pair of lines, the second line (in... |
A common way of creating new lexical items is through compounding, and ABSL makes productive use of this option. In picture naming tasks, ABSL signers often produce two or more nominal signs together. We found that a particular kind of sign denoting the size and shape of the object, which we call a size and shape speci... |
The assimilation found in these affixed forms is not purely motoric in its motivation, since we do not see it in other nonsymmetrical two-handed signs where instead we find that the nondominant hand is overwhelmingly in a lax five-finger-extended shape, regardless of the shape of the dominant hand. It is intriguing tha... |
That conventionalization is involved is supported by the fact that these examples of assimilation occur in a productive process of specifier affix formation (though the complex words themselves are mostly not conventionalized). Nor do we find handshape assimilation in compounds that are more randomly formed by idiosync... |
Within families with more than one deaf family member that we investigated, a single form is used. Figure 22 a, b shows the versions of two families for this con- (22a) is signed identically for the two deaf brothers and their hearing close-aged sibling in one family. A different version (22b) is signed identically for... |
In the familylect of one family with many deaf members, we find a clue to how conventionalization can lead to duality. The family members include a deaf mother and five deaf children out of eight, a family in which all eight children are fluent signers. (The deaf mother has five deaf siblings herself.) The example we p... |
There are three reasons for believing that this is a phonological alternation, and not mere motoric coarticulation. First, assimilation does not occur in other villagers' sign for EGG. Second, it is confined to this family and occurs in EGG for all four members of the family that we videotaped. Third, it is not gradien... |
In any motor activity, actions may overlap and otherwise affect other actions in the same motor schema, and the articulations of language are no exception (Browman and Goldstein 1989). But systematic alternations of categories of elements in the same class of environments point to phonological organization, characteriz... |
The first example is the sign for TREE. There were a variety of responses among signers to the picture of a tree, most of them complex descriptions, conveying the trunk and then the leaves and then something about the nature of the tree, such as whether it is a date palm or some other kind. But the youngest person we v... |
In these examples, it is the fact that the signs are so conventionalized and familiar in these native signers that gives rise to duality. Iconicity is dormant; the hands are not required to represent a visual image as an iconic whole; and the formational elements are free to organize themselves into an independent syst... |
Our work also suggests that it is not only the cognitive load of a large vocabulary that triggers the development of phonology, but other factors as well, notably conventionalization, and the concomitant weakening of a one-to-one correspondence between form and meaning. This claim is compatible with the well-documented... |
The study puts forward the notion of the familylect, arising, we argue, from conventionalization within families that have rich sign language interaction. An additional motivation for the emergence of a familylect is sociological. Labov's work (1994 Labov's work (, 2001 ) has provided robust and widespread evidence for... |
Research has shown that deaf children exposed to irregular models tend to impose more regular structure on their language productions (Singleton and Newport 2004; Senghas et al. 2005), a phenomenon that is sometimes attributed to creolization. The nature of the processes behind "creolization" is a hotly debated issue. ... |
We propose that conventionalization among signers, and the automaticity and redundancy that go with it, underlie the emergence of a meaningless formal level of structure in the language of a community. As a particular sign becomes conventionalized, attention to the form-meaning correspondence is reduced, and the format... |
In the familylect's conventionalized compound, EGG, the 'beakiness' of a handshape that looks like a bird's beak no longer contributes to its meaning, and production of the sign becomes automatic for the signers. In this case, we might hypothesize that the number of fingers selected for the first part of the sign becom... |
It seems reasonable to adopt, as Pinker and Jackendoff (2005) do, Hockett's suggestion that the need to create a large vocabulary contributes to the emergence of duality. At the same time, laboratory experiments suggest that humans may have a propensity to create duality even with a very small vocabulary of symbols (De... |
The aural/oral modality does not lend itself to iconicity to the same extent that the visual/corporeal modality does. In fact, the ability to transparently represent correspondence between the sound of a word and its meaning is so limited in the aural/oral medium that de Saussure (1916) proposed arbitrariness in the so... |
The research reported here resonates with current work in phonological theory that speaks to the issue of innateness in phonology. For example, Blevins (2004) provides persuasive evidence that most properties of the synchronic phonology of any language result from the interaction of physical, cognitive, and social forc... |
centuries, its division from Galenism after the work of Vesalius and Harvey; its emergence in Sydenham, the English Hippocrates, and in Boerhaave and its modern re-emergence through Osier and 20th century ethical writing. I shall draw on the experiences of a Swann Hellenic cruise on "The Legacy of Hippocrates", [3] [4]... |
Many believe that our nearest primate relatives fail to qualify as persons; their moral status is lower than ours. This difference is often attributed to their lesser mental capacity. Perhaps it is due to their lacking rationality, practical rationality, or the capacity for moral agency. But if chimpanzees and other pr... |
Propositions (1) and (2) have been taken to support a range of moral reservations about human enhancements-interventions that augment the capacities of normal, healthy humans. These reservations have not been clearly specified, but in each case the initial thought seems to be that, at the very least (3) We (existing hu... |
One of Fukuyama's worries is that enhanced beings might claim greater rights than are enjoyed by unenhanced humans. But another concern is that enhanced beings would actually have greater rights than the unenhanced. This could be true if they possessed supra-personal moral status, as (1) maintains they might. 4 Even wr... |
assumption that the emergence of beings with a moral status higher than that of persons is possible, the emergence of [supra-persons] would not extinguish whatever rights the unenhanced have by virtue of being persons '' (2009, pp. 349-350). I will argue that (1) and (2) are in fact quite resilient-more resilient than ... |
First, some assumptions about moral status. The concept of moral status is most commonly deployed in attempts to explain or justify the attribution of certain basic moral protections, such as basic moral rights or claims, to certain beings. For example, it may be said that human fetuses or non-human primates have a rig... |
Beyond this, I wish to remain as open as possible to competing views about the relationship between moral status and moral rights and claims. However, I will need to assume that Assumption II Two beings of the same moral status may enjoy different rights and claims. This assumption is shared by those mentioned above wh... |
In addition to these assumptions about moral status, I also need to make some assumptions about the manner and circumstances in which beings of supra-personal moral status would be created, if they were to be created at all. I assume that suprapersons would be created through the enhancement of pre-existing human perso... |
In the next two sections I will assess (1) and (2) in the light of Buchanan's critique of them. In the subsequent sections, I offer and defend my own response to the objection. First, then, claim (1). Buchanan doubts though does not outright deny (1); he doubts that beings created through the enhancement of humans coul... |
Each of the possibilities depicted in (Fig. 2) is consistent with No Threshold. If Threshold is correct, then enhanced beings could not have greater moral status than ordinary humans: there simply exists no higher moral stratum. Threshold thus provides a sturdy bulwark against (1). On the other hand, No Threshold does ... |
However, even if Threshold is superior to No Threshold, it will not follow that that human enhancement could not create supra-persons. Buchanan claims that unless one adopts No Threshold ''the worry that biomedical enhancements for some but not all would create a new moral status of [supra-person] is highly dubious'', ... |
10 These accounts, as understood by Buchanan, have three important features. First, they hold that there is some mental capacity that confers a special 9 A similar view has also been entertained by McMahan (2009a, pp. 601-602). 10 See, for example, Buchanan (2009, pp. 357, 360-361), Rawls (1971, esp. pp. 504-512), Kors... |
moral status, and that is possessed by currently typical adult humans. This may be, for example, the capacity for practical reasoning, for moral agency, or for engaging in practices of mutual accountability. Second, they hold that the degree to which one possesses that capacity is unimportant to moral status; it matter... |
Respect-based accounts of moral status thus support Threshold. I am aware of no popular competing account of moral status that supports Plateau. However, it is easy to imagine a variant of the respect-based account that would support it. Consider an account according to which two mental capacities, F and G, are all tha... |
11 But this has little evidential significance. After all, philosophical work on moral status has typically been motivated by a desire to explain the elevated or equal moral status of humans, and, in some cases, to accommodate the common sense view that some animals also have significant moral status. If these are one'... |
Alternatively, Buchanan might reply that it is difficult to call to mind any capacity that could plausibly confer supra-personal moral status. It is difficult to think of a mental capacity, lacked by ordinary humans but potentially possessed by enhanced beings, that could fill the role of Capacity G in the three tiered... |
It is widely held that empathy is relevant to, and perhaps even necessary for, moral agency, and many philosophers have held that the capacity for moral agency is necessary for the higher form of moral status. Suppose, then, that supra-persons would have a capacity that would be better for moral agency than mere empath... |
I have a further suggestion, and one that may tax our imaginative abilities less than McMahan's. Perhaps supra-personal moral status would be conferred by the capacity for constructive participation in some new form of social co-operation. It is not inconceivable that quantitative increases in capacities for altruism, ... |
An obvious reason for denying (2) is that moral status is not zero-sum: one being's gain in moral status does not necessitate a loss for any other. So even if enhanced humans acquired supra-personal moral status, ordinary humans would retain their existing moral status-that associated with personhood. However, as Bucha... |
13 Suppose, as is somewhat plausible, that it is morally permissible for a person to kill one non-human primate if and only if this will (a) prevent the death of three or more primates of equal moral status, or (b) prevent the death of one or more primates of greater moral status. Now imagine a population of ten primat... |
In any case, Buchanan appears to accept that non-human animals might be harmed through losing immunity to permissible sacrifice (2009, p. 364). What he resists is the suggestion that persons-such as ordinary, unenhanced humanscould be harmed in this way. This resistance is based on the thought that being a person makes... |
14 In saying that the unenhanced primates now have less immunity to permissible sacrifice, I do not mean that they may now be sacrificed for the sake of less important goals; I mean that they may be sacrificed in a wider range of circumstances. The reason that they can be sacrificed in a wider range of circumstances is... |
In addition, there are varieties of permissible harm other than sacrifice (i.e., intentional killing) against which our maximal inviolability provides no protection at all. Even if I, as a person, am inviolable, and maximally so, it would be permissible for a charitable or public hospital to deprive me of headache cure... |
First, reasons not to impose the second order harm of reduced immunity to permissible harm (henceforth sometimes just 'immunity') are not always decisive. Suppose, as is plausible, that emergency medical staff have stronger moral claims than others to the avoidance of certain harms. Perhaps they have stronger claims to... |
The case just described is most naturally understood as one in which the politician reduces the immunity of some to permissible harm not by increasing the moral status of others, but by changing their circumstances. However, similar thoughts may apply to cases in which one reduces the immunity of some by bringing it ab... |
In fact, we might have good moral reasons to encourage status enhancements even if doing so would have no economic or scientific benefits. This is because, just as the status enhancements would reduce the immunity of, and thereby harm, unenhanced humans, so too they would increase the immunity of, and thereby benefit, ... |
Thus, most believe that there is currently a grossly unequal distribution of immunity across different kinds of beings such that humans typically possess much more immunity than pigs, which possess much more immunity than chickens, which possess much more immunity than scallops. If these differences in immunity indeed ... |
By analogy, suppose that differences in culpability between persons give rise to differences in their moral liability to punishment. Then if there is a difference in culpability between two persons, there will be an inequality in their liability to punishment. But this inequality arises from a difference in culpability... |
It is, however, doubtful whether status enhancements by some, but not others, would inevitably lead to an unjust or otherwise disvaluable distribution of mental capacity across beings. Suppose, for example, that access to status enhancements is decided via a lottery procedure to which all agree in advance. Now, it seem... |
One way of defending greater concern for the losses than the gains would appeal to the idea that we should be partial towards those who suffer the losses of immunity-we should attach greater weight to the losses of immunity than to the gains of immunity because we should care more about ordinary, unenhanced human perso... |
It might be responded that in deciding whether to encourage status enhancements, one could nevertheless be partial against the enhanced, though in a nonstandard kind of way. One could be partial in the sense that one cared less about gains and losses of immunity when those who received those gains and losses would, aft... |
In any case, even if we accept that this non-standard kind of partiality could be supported by moral reasons, it is difficult to see any reason why it would be so supported in the present case. It is difficult to see why the kinds of relations that hold between us and future unenhanced humans could support partiality, ... |
It could be argued that merely bearing the relation of moral equality to another being-sharing one's moral status with it-is enough to give one reason to be partial to that being. On this view, persons should be partial to other persons, and supra-persons to other supra-persons. It is perhaps somewhat more plausible th... |
In addition, the view that we should have greater concern for those who share our moral status has some unappealing implications. For example, it implies that in addition to our reasons to treat animals less well than ordinary humans, since they have lower moral status, we have a further reason to treat them less well:... |
A more promising way of arguing that we should attach greater weight to the losses of immunity caused by status enhancements than to the corresponding gains would appeal not to partiality, but to the claim that we have, quite generally, stronger reasons not to contribute to harms-normally understood as losses-than to c... |
A problem, however, is that, according to common sense morality, we have some reason to contribute to benefits, though it may be weaker than the reason not to contribute to comparable harms. Moreover, if a benefit exceeds a harm by a wide margin, the reason to contribute to the benefit will, in many cases, be stronger ... |
Of course, we may have more limited rights, such as rights not to have our immunity reduced in such-and-such a way, or to such-and-such degree, that would invariably be violated by encouraging status enhancements though they are not violated, for instance, by training emergency medics. I see no good reason for supposin... |
I have been describing status enhancements as transformations in which fixed individuals make the transition from personhood to supra-personhood. One final attempt to show that we have most reason not to encourage status enhancements would question the accuracy of this description. It would appeal to the thought that a... |
If status enhancements are identity altering, then the overall package of harms and benefits that a status enhancement produces is as follows. (1) There are harms, in the form of losses of immunity, suffered by those who remain unenhanced. (2) There is typically a harm, through going out of existence, for the person wh... |
Fortunately, for the proponent of human enhancement, it is very doubtful whether status enhancements would have to be identity altering. It is true that existing philosophical work on our identity tends to address the question 'what is required for personal identity?' This question is naturally read as presupposing tha... |
It seems plausible, then, that identity could be preserved across the transition from personhood to supra-personhood. Of course, it might well be argued that identity could be preserved, but not in such a way as to retain its ordinary significance. Derek Parfit has argued that identity can be lost while what is normati... |
Allen Buchanan responds to this objection by questioning (1) and (2), but I have argued that these claims are difficult to undermine. I have argued, contra Buchanan, that (1) and (2) could be true even if we reject the view that moral status constantly rises with mental capacity, and even if we allow that persons are i... |
I have assumed throughout that supra-persons would be created through the enhancement of pre-existing persons. If they came about in some other way, for example, through the enhancement of early embryos that do not yet qualify as persons, then some of my arguments would not hold. In that case, there would be no persons... |
So here is an argument by a progressive thinker, seen by some as relativist himself, against the relativist zeitgeist, all the more surprising for coming from the pen of a man who was of a liberal persuasion at a time when autonomy is often seen hand-in-hand with a postmodernism that makes unifying normative projects u... |
Dworkin's primary discipline was, of course, law, and so his purpose had been to explore philosophical investigations into the conceptual basis of legal argumentation. To those outside the legal academy, this might be off-putting and of dubious relevance at first glance as well as render some of his material difficult ... |
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