AG/Workshop #3

Raum / Room: U2-147

Until recently, sign language analysis implied the use of analogue video technology, patiently winding tapes back and forth. While the advent of digital video in the 1990s, it has become possible to quickly compare different sets of data. The creation of transcription software such as SignStream and ELAN is facilitating the transcription and analysis of larger corpora. The creation of sign language corpora that could be used by researchers with varying interests is still in its pilot stages, however. The EU-funded creation and publication of the online ECHO corpus containing comparable data from multiple European sign languages was an important pilot project, which raised many methodological questions about transcription and segmentation of sign language data.

One of the most important questions that arose from the project is intimitely tied to linguistic analysis: how does one determine sentence boundaries in sign languages? Any sign language corpus will need to contain sentence-level translations in a spoken language for easy accessibility. For this purpose, and of course for linguistic analysis itself, we need a clear view on where sentences start and end, when a sentence is not completed, etc. This is not a trivial matter for any sign language studied to date, as relatively little is known about syntactic, prosodic, and discourse domains. Morever, the presence of many simultaneous channels, including the two manual articulators, allows for complex overlapping structures. The risk of letting spoken language boundaries influence the analysis of a sign language already at the transcription stage is clearly present.

The need for the creation of sign language corpora and the need to discuss issues as the above is particularly urgent, given the threat sign languages in western countries face from the rapid medical developments in recent years, as Johnston (2004) demonstrated for the situation in Australia.

The ECHO corpus (2004) http://www.let.ru.nl/sign-lang/echo/

Johnston, T. (2003). W(h)ither the deaf community? Population, genetics and the future of Auslan (Australian Sign Language). American Annals of the Deaf 148: 358-375.

Liste der Vorträge

• Marion Blondel, Beppie van den Bogaer, Anne Baker:
  The sentence in sign language acquisition
• Onno Crasborn, Els van der Kooij:
  Introduction: what's the problem?
• Invited speaker: Elisabeth Engberg-Pedersen:
  Intertwined ellipsis - a multiclausal construction in Danish Sign Language
• J. Fenlon, T. Denmark, B. Woll:
  Seeing sentence boundaries
• Irene Greftegreff:
  Where Shall We Cut? Issues in Analysing Norwegian Sign Language Texts
• Martje Hansen, Jens Heßmann:
  Reanalysing sentences in German Sign Language (DGS) texts
• Trevor Johnston, Adam Schembri:
  Identifying clauses in three signed languages: applying a functional approach
• Kristin Mulroony:
  Where does the period go? Defining a line for narrative analysis
• Josep Quer:
  Transcription as heuristic tool
• Ulrike Wrobel:
  How to utter a complex sentence by using a single sign