Positive signs: How sign language typology benefits deaf communities and linguistic theory

Abstract

Sign language typology is the systematic comparative study of linguistic structures across sign languages, and has emerged as a separate linguistic sub-discipline over the past 15 years. It is situated at the crossroads between linguistic typology and sign language linguistics, the latter itself a relatively young discipline with its roots in the 1960s and 70s (McBurney 2001). The cross-fertilisation initiated by the advent of sign language typology is obvious: Typologists gain an entirely new dimension in their study of linguistic diversity, and sign language linguists gain a rich tool box of concepts and methods for discovering typological patterns across sign languages. Beyond theory and methodology, the impact that sign language typology research has on the deaf communities who are the primary users of these languages is discussed in Section 2. Section 3 discusses some areas in which sign language typology has made unique contributions to linguistic theory and has prompted discussions that may otherwise not have come to the surface.