Chapter 1
Sign language corpus linguistics
Taking stock of an emerging discipline
Taking the 2004 LREC Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages (Streiter & Vettori 2004) as the watershed, this chapter takes stock of the development of sign language corpus linguistics over the past twenty years. After dispelling myths about sign languages, the chapter gives an overview of practices and challenges in building and annotating sign language corpora. The chapter then tracks the historical development of sign language linguistic corpora across the globe, noting the leading role that EU countries still play in this regard. Online archiving and the availability of sign language linguistic corpora to researchers and other users are then discussed. The chapter then explores their contributions in terms of research, education, interpreting, and avatar creation, before reflecting on their role in documenting and preserving sign languages, and their potential benefit for national Deaf communities. Finally, summaries of the chapters that make up this volume are presented.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.On sign languages
- 3.On corpus representativeness
- 4.Compiling a sign language corpus
- 4.1What kind of data
- 4.2Collecting video data
- 4.3Recording metadata
- 4.4Rendering data machine-readable
- 4.5Annotating linguistic features
- 5.A brief history of sign language linguistic corpora
- 6.Data availability and distribution
- 7.Contributions and the way forward
- 8.Chapter summaries
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Notes
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References