This paper concerns the marking of interrogation in French Sign Language (LSF). Early work on Sign Languages (SLs) underlined the role of non-manual elements in the production of interrogatives. Studies often point to the role of eyebrows depending on the type of question: eyebrows would usually be raised for the production of yes/no questions, while they would be lowered for other types of questions. For LSF, previous studies seem to validate this contrast. We tested this thoroughly in the framework of AZee, a formal approach to SL modeling based on the identification of linguistic associations between forms and identified meanings, called production rules. We present our methodology to extract AZee production rules, consisting of data searches alternating form and meaning criteria gradually converging to strong associations, ultimately leading to production rules. Our results (i) show no link between raised or lowered eyebrows and a specific type of question, (ii) highlight instead the role of another non-manual marker: the advancement of the chin. However, since eyebrows remain frequently involved in the analyzed questions (all types included), we intend to further focus on the potential role of the signer's expectations while formulating his request.
@inproceedings{martinod:24038:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Martinod, Emmanuella and Filhol, Michael},
title = {Formal Representation of Interrogation in {French} {Sign} {Language}},
pages = {307--315},
editor = {Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Hochgesang, Julie A. and Mesch, Johanna and Schulder, Marc},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC-COLING} 2024 11th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Evaluation of Sign Language Resources},
maintitle = {2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC-COLING} 2024)},
publisher = {{ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA) and the International Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL)}},
address = {Torino, Italy},
day = {25},
month = may,
year = {2024},
isbn = {978-2-493814-30-2},
language = {english},
url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/24038.pdf}
}
| Filhol, Michael