Sandler and Lillo-Martin's volume is an incredibly important, powerful, and timely work. That the sign languages used by deaf people around the world are real human languages in every meaningful sense of the term has become a given among linguists over the past 30 years; as Sandler and Lillo-Martin point out, “In sum, the way sign language is acquired and the ease and speed of its transmission strongly support the view that a single cognitive system underlies language in both [spoken and signed] modalities” (pp. 3−4). Furthermore, apart from the psycholinguistic perspective, it is clear that
sign languages are used for everything that spoken languages are—within the family circle, for social interaction, oratory, education, scientific exchange, introspection and dreaming, story-telling, theater, and poetry… In short, whatever it is that humans are doing when they use spoken language, they are doing the same thing, in some significant sense, when they use sign language. (p. 4)
Yet, the details of what that actually means, why it is so, and how sign languages differ linguistically from spoken languages have remained largely unanswered. To be sure, there is an extensive and growing body of solid linguistic research that has been and continues to be conducted, not only on American Sign Language (ASL) but also on a number of other sign languages. Yet, beyond the recognition that sign language is real human language, most linguists—both with theoretical and applied interests—remain largely uninformed about the details of sign language and linguistic research on sign language. Sandler and Lillo-Martin have now produced a work of the most serious sort of linguistic scholarship, and it is one that is important not only for those specifically interested in the linguistics of sign languages but also for anyone interested in linguistic theory. It is also extremely accessible for those who are not particularly familiar with sign languages, which adds to its utility and overall value.
This volume is divided into five broad units, subdivided into 25 chapters. The first unit consists of the introductory chapter, enticingly entitled, “One Human Language or Two?” The second unit deals with morphology, and topics include introductions to morphology, inflectional morphology, derivational morphology, classifier constructions, and lexicalization, among other issues. The third unit focuses on phonology, in nine chapters that include consideration of sequentiality and simultaneity in sign languages, hand configuration, location, the role of the nondominant hand, movement, the question of syllables in sign languages, prosody, and the theoretical implications of sign language phonology. The fourth unit addresses the syntax of sign languages; it includes chapters on clausal structure in general and across sign languages, variations and extensions on basic sentence structures, pronouns, topic and focus, and wh-questions, among others. Finally, the last unit consists of a single chapter entitled, “The Effects of Modality: Linguistic Universals and Sign Language Universals.” The overall goal of this volume, as articulated by Sandler and Lillo-Martin, “is to appeal to general theories of linguistic structure to analyze the morphology, phonology, and syntax of sign languages, and in so doing, to arrive at a pool of properties that are truly universal” (pp. xv−xvi), and this goal is well and truly achieved.
