Search results for "signed language"
showing 4 items of 4 documents
Mutual intelligibility among the sign languages of Belgium and the Netherlands
2015
AbstractIn an exploratory study of mutual intelligibility between the sign languages of the northern part of Belgium (Flemish Sign Language, VGT), the southern part of Belgium (French Belgian Sign Language, LSFB), and the Netherlands (Sign Language of the Netherlands, NGT), we tested the comprehension of VGT by signers of LSFB and NGT. In order to measure the influence of iconic structures (classifier constructions and constructed action) that linguistic analyses have shown to be similar across different sign languages, two genres were compared: narrative and informative signing. To investigate the effect of the overlap between the spoken languages surrounding the Dutch and Flemish Deaf com…
Transitivity prominence within and across modalities
2020
The idea of transitivity as a scalar phenomenon is well known (e.g., Hopper & Thompson 1980; Tsunoda 1985; Haspelmath 2015). However, as with most areas of linguistic study, it has been almost exclusively studied with a focus on spoken languages. A rare exception to this is Kimmelman (2016), who investigates transitivity in Russian Sign Language (RSL) on the basis of corpus data. Kimmelman attempts to establish a transitivity prominence hierarchy of RSL verbs, and compares this ranking to the verb meanings found in the ValPal database (Hartmann, Haspelmath & Bradley 2013). He arrives at the conclusion that using the frequency of overt objects in corpus data is a successful measure o…
A cross-linguistic comparison of reference across five signed languages
2022
AbstractDo signers of different signed languages establish and maintain reference the same way? Here we compare how signers of five Western deaf signed languages coordinate fully conventionalized forms with more richly improvised semiotics to identify and talk about referents of varying agency. The five languages (based on a convenience sample) are Auslan, Irish Sign Language, Finnish Sign Language, Norwegian Sign Language, and Swedish Sign Language. Using ten retellings ofFrog, Where Are You?from each language, we analyze tokens of referring expressions with respect to: (a) activation status (new vs. maintained vs. re-introduced); (b) semiotic strategy (e.g., pointing sign, fingerspelling,…
The Usability of the Annotation
2016
Several corpus projects for sign languages have tried to establish conventions and standards for the annotation of signed data. When discussing corpora, it is necessary to develop a way of considering and evaluating holistically the features and problems of annotation. This paper aims to develop a conceptual framework for the evaluation of the usability of annotations. The purpose of the framework is not to give conventions for annotating but to offer tools for the evaluation of the usability of the annotation, in order to make annotations more usable and make it possible to justify and explain decisions about annotation conventions. Based on our experience of annotation in the corpus proje…