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Relatively little attention has been paid to the variation between sign languages. There has been comparison of lexicon but little on phonological, grammatical and pragmatic differences. It is of importance to discover where sign languages are similar and where they can vary. The particular aim of the TISLR 2000 conference was to open up new linguistic perspectives and hopefully to stimulate collaborative work between different sign language groups for the future. The conference provided ample opportunity for researchers to discuss and there was also one room reserved for researchers to work with informants from different languages. This has already borne fruit. In the paper by Pyers (this volume) the author has been able to extend her exploration of the ASL sign THINK as a verb expressing false belief to other sign languages and determine that such a verb exists in these other languages, supporting her thesis that this fact has its origin in Deaf culture. Some papers start out with a comparison of different sign languages in order to determine if common principles are at work. Nyst & Baker (this volume) for example compare the phonology of name signs across several languages. Johnston (this volume) compares the lexicon of three historically related languages and one non-related language, and comes to the provoking conclusion that the lexicon of BSL, NZSL and Auslan does not provide evidence for considering them as different languages. By contrast, Hurlbut (this volume) compares the lexicon of different dialects of Malaysian Sign Language, arriving at the conclusion that there are at least three different sign languages in Malaysia rather than one. At the meeting the results of the European Science Foundation network Intersign were reported. This network has explicitly addressed the challenges of sharing data across sign languages in terms of transcription and databases. This debate has resulted in publications on this topic (Bergman, Boyes Braem, Hanke & Pizzuto 2000). A number of different sign languages are now being included in the large typology project World Atlas of Languages (WALS) at the Leipzig Max Planck Institute and crosslinguistic projects are being started in several places. It is to be hoped that this trend will continue to give us more insight into the typology of sign languages.
Aside from the explicitly comparative investigations, other papers in the present volume focus on details of individual sign languages. The contributions have been organized in five different sections: general, lexicon and phonology, morphosyntax, pragmatics, and psycholinguistics. Papers on acquisition have been included in the appropriate section according to the aspect of acquisition they deal with. The two papers in the general section were given as invited addresses and are broader in their scope, addressing the field of sign linguistics as a whole: on the one hand the development of approaches within the field of sign linguistics (Woll this volume) and on the other the role of the Deaf researcher (Ladd, this volume).
Deaf participation
At TISLR 2000 there were many sign languages represented, as mentioned above. There were also Deaf researchers from several different countries. However, it must be said that there are still too few Deaf researchers over all and even fewer, who attend such an international conference. Dr. Paddy Ladd from the University of Bristol addressed the sociolinguistic issue of the importance of native signers conducting research (Ladd, this volume).
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