This paper aims to address and clarify one issue we believe is crucial in constructing Sign Languages (SL) corpora: identifying appropriate tools for representing in written form SL productions of any sort, i.e. lexical items, utterances, discourse at large. Towards this end, building on research done within our group on multimedia corpora of both SL and spoken or verbal languages (vl), we first outline some of the major requirements and guidelines followed in current work with vl corpora (e.g. regarding transcription, representation [mark-up], coding [or annotation] Chiari, 2007; Edwards & Lampert; 1993; Leech & al, 1995; Ochs, 1979; Powers, 2005, among others). We highlight that a basic requirement of vl corpora is an easily readable transcription that, aside from specialist linguistic annotations, allows anyone who knows the object language to reconstruct its forms, and its form-meaning correspondences. Second, we show how this basic requirement is not met in most current work on SL, where the ‘transcription’ of SL productions consists primarily of word-labels taken from vl, inappropriately called ‘glosses’. As argued by some authors (e.g. Pizzuto & Pietrandrea, 2001; Russo, 2005; Pizzuto et al., 2006), the use of such word-labels as a primary representation tool grossly misrepresents SL, even when supported by specialist linguistic annotations (e.g. Stokoe-based notations, the Berkeley Transcription System [Slobin et al., 2001]). Drawing on a crosslinguistic overview of relevant work on SL lexicon and discourse (e.g. Brennan, 2001; Cuxac, 2000; Cuxac & Sallandre, 2007; Russo, 2004; Antinoro Pizzuto et al., 2007), we illustrate how the ‘transcriptions’ most widely used for SL do not allow to anyone who knows the specific SL to reconstruct its forms and form-meaning correspondences, and are especially inadequate for representing complex sign units that are very frequent in SL discourse, and exhibit highly iconic, muldimensional/multilinear features that have no parallel in vl. Third, we present and discuss ongoing research on Italian Sign Language (LIS) in which experienced deaf signers explore the use of SignWriting (Sutton, 1995) as a tool for both composing texts conceived in written form – thereby creating a corpus of written LIS – and for transcribing corpora of face-to-face LIS discourse (Di Renzo et al., 2006; Di Renzo, in press; Lamano et al., in press). The results show that, in both cases, deaf signers can easily represent the form-meaning patterns of their language with an accuracy never experienced with other representation or notation systems. The analysis of the texts produced has also provided new indications on the structure of LIS, highlighting the need of revising the criteria for constructing lexical corpora on the grounds of regularities (and variance) found in discourse corpora. While all of this suggests that SignWriting can be a valuable tool for addressing the representation issue in constructing SL corpora, the present computerized form of SignWriting poses technical problems that severely constrain its use. We conclude specifying the problems that need to be faced for conducting more extensive experimentations.
@inproceedings{pizzuto:08014:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Pizzuto, Elena Antinoro and Chiari, Isabella and Rossini, Paolo},
title = {The Representation Issue and its Multifaceted Aspects in Constructing Sign Language Corpora: Questions, Answers, Further Problems},
pages = {150--158},
editor = {Crasborn, Onno and Efthimiou, Eleni and Hanke, Thomas and Thoutenhoofd, Ernst D. and Zwitserlood, Inge},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2008} 3rd Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Construction and Exploitation of Sign Language Corpora},
maintitle = {6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2008)},
publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
address = {Marrakech, Morocco},
day = {1},
month = jun,
year = {2008},
language = {english},
url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/08014.pdf}
}