William Stokoe and the discipline of sign language linguistics

The first modern linguistic analysis of a signed language was published in 1960 - William Clarence Stokoe's (1919-2000) Sign Language Structure. Altho ugh the initial impact of Stokoe's monograph on linguistics and education w as minimal, his work formed a solid base for what was to become a new field of research: American Sign Language (ASL) Linguistics. Together with the w ork of those that followed (in particular Ursula Bellugi and colleagues), S tokoe's ground-breaking work on the structure of ASL has led to an acceptan ce of signed languages as autonomous linguistic systems that exhibit the co mplex structure characteristic of all human languages.