Hand Talk: Sign Language among American Indian Nations (review)

Abstract

Hand Talk: Sign Language among American Indian Nations, by Jeffrey E. Davis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 244 pp., cloth, $95, ISBN 978-0-5218-7010-8, paperback, $32.99, 978-0-5216-9030-0) With this volume, Jeffrey Davis makes a major contribution to our knowledge of a significant signing tradition, the signed language used as a lingua franca and for other purposes over a very wide part of North America - the language commonly known as Plains Indian Sign Language or Plains Sign Talk. Most of the focus of the signed language linguistics that has emerged during the past half century has been on the signed languages of deaf people. Here Davis applies, in comprehensive fashion, the techniques of this emergent discipline to a signed language that was developed and used primarily by hearing people. It is significant that Davis maintains and demonstrates, in fact, that this signing is a language in every meaningful sense of the word and that it is not simply a surrogate for a spoken language or a complex gestural system. In this regard, Davis documents the existence of and describes in some detail the wealth of historical materials, written, illustrated, and filmed, concerning PISL, a language that is certainly endangered. In addition, the author maintains a web site where readers may view examples of the illustrations, photographs, and video material that form the corpus for the book's analyses. The overall work would represent an important addition to the literature on signed languages for these reasons alone, but it is Davis's historical and linguistic analyses that elevate Hand Talk to the first rank. To make the case for the linguistic status of PISL, Davis examines its structure at the level of phonology, morphology, and syntax employing the concepts of sign language linguistics that have been developed since the last comprehensive study of the language was conducted by LaMont West in i960. Students of the history of sign language studies will be particularly interested in chapters 2 through 6 that provide detail on the development of sophisticated linguistic treatments of PISL. Davis provides in-depth discussions of the work of Garrick Mallery in the 1870s and '80s, that of Hugh Scott in the 1930s, and the aforementioned study by La Mont West, carried out under the influence of major figures in the field of anthropological linguistics, including Alfred Kroeber. Davis shows that West's work in the late 1950s, in particular, paralleled that of William C. Stokoe during the same period. In this regard, Davis concludes that [t]he level of linguistic analysis and description conducted by West in the late 1950's did not occur for until Stokoe, Croneberg, and Casterline (1965) developed a phonetic notational system for signs and compiled the first comprehensive dictionary of ASL (97). Davis even discusses what happened to the mysterious West after he completed his doctoral dissertation on PISL (never published) at Indiana University. The linguistic meat of the book is contained in chapters 7 (Comparative Studies of Historical Relatedness) and 8 (Linguistic Analysis of PISL). In these chapters, Davis uses the tools of modem linguistics (including socio- and historical linguistics) to support, in essence, three major assertions: 1. …