Signing thoughts gives the possibility to express unreal situations, possibilities and so forth. Also, signers may express their attitude on these thoughts such as being uncertain about an imagined situation. We describe a methodological approach within the semantic field work which was used for identifying nonmanuals in Austrian Sign Language (÷GS) which tend to occur in thoughts and which may code (epistemic and deontic) modality. First, the process of recording short stories which very likely include lines of thoughts is shown. Second, the annotation process and the outcome of this process is described. The findings show that in almost all cases the different annotators identified the same non-manual movements/positions and the same starting and ending points of these nonmanuals in association with the lexical entries. The direction of motion was distinguished by a contrast of movement. Some nonmanuals were distinguished due to intensified performance, size of performance, speed of performance, an additional movement component, or additional body tension. Finally, we present nonmanuals which frequently occur in signed thoughts. These include various epistemic markers, a deontic marker, indicators which show the hypothetical nature of signed thoughts, and an interrogative marker which is different to interrogative markers in direct questions.
@inproceedings{lackner:14005:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Lackner, Andrea and Riemer Kankkonen, Nikolaus},
title = {Signing thoughts! A methodological approach within the semantic field work used for coding nonmanuals which express modality in {Austrian} {Sign} {Language} ({{\"O}GS})},
pages = {100--104},
editor = {Crasborn, Onno and Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Kristoffersen, Jette and Mesch, Johanna},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2014} 6th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Beyond the Manual Channel},
maintitle = {9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2014)},
publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
address = {Reykjavik, Iceland},
day = {31},
month = may,
year = {2014},
language = {english},
url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/14005.pdf}
}