sign-lang@LREC Anthology

Pointing and verb modification: the expression of semantic roles in the Auslan Corpus

de Beuzeville, Louise


Volume:
Proceedings of the LREC2008 3rd Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Construction and Exploitation of Sign Language Corpora
Venue:
Marrakech, Morocco
Date:
1 June 2008
Pages:
13–16
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
License:
CC BY-NC
sign-lang ID:
08020

Content Categories

Languages:
Auslan
Corpora:
Auslan Corpus, SVIAP Corpus

Abstract

As part of a larger project investigating the grammatical use of space in Auslan, 62 texts from the Auslan Corpus were annotated and analysed for the spatial modification of verbs to show semantic roles. Data were taken from two groups of native and near-native Auslan signers. Spontaneous narratives were sourced from a sociolinguistic variation corpus collected from 211 participants all over Australia. The second set of texts was elicited from 100 adult native signers of Auslan from the Auslan Corpus Project. Participants retold to a deaf interlocutor a prepared Aesop’s fable and a spontaneous personal recount of a memorable event, as well as answering a series of questions on their attitudes to various factors influencing the deaf community (such as genetic testing and cochlear implants). The texts from both corpora were recorded on digital videotape and then annotated using ELAN software. Here we report on 62 texts that have been annotated (approximately 9,000 signs from 50 narrative texts and 9,000 from 10 attitude surveys). Each sign or meaningful gesture was identified, with points being categorised as pronouns or other. These signs were then classified into word class and the nouns and verbs tagged for whether they could be modified spatially. Next, the indicating nouns and verbs were annotated as to whether or not their spatial modification was realised. In this paper, we discuss the use of the ELAN search functions across multiple files in order to identify the proportion of sign types in the texts and the frequency with which indicating verbs are actually modified for space. We then searched all files again to identify all instances where pointing signs occurred directly before or after an indicating verb, in order to calculate whether the collocation of a point (pronoun, other or either) and a non-modified indicating verb was statistically significant. Despite the claim that indicating verbs in signed languages are obligatorily modified (‘inflected’) with respect to loci in the signing space in order to show person ‘agreement’, we found that these verbs are actually only spatially modified about on third of the time (Johnston et al and de B et al., forthcoming) and this study showed that to be partly as a result of presence of points. The results help determine where and when the spatial modification of indicating verbs is used in natural Auslan texts (and potentially other signed languages). Based on this data, we suggest that 1) the degree of grammaticalization of indicating verbs may not be as great as once thought and 2) the apparent non-obligatory or variable use of spatial modifications may be partly accounted for by the presence of pointing signs—very frequent in signed texts—before or directly after the verb.
References
Johnston, T. A., de Beuzeville, L., Schembri, A., & Goswell, D. (2007) On not missing the point: indicating verbs in Auslan. Paper presented at the 10th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Krakow, Poland, July 15th – 20th, 2007
de Beuzeville, L., Johnston, T. A., Schembri, A., & Goswell, D. (forthcoming) The use of space with lexical verbs in Auslan.

Document Download

Paper PDF BibTeX File+ Abstract

BibTeX Export

@inproceedings{debeuzeville:08020:sign-lang:lrec,
  author    = {de Beuzeville, Louise},
  title     = {Pointing and verb modification: the expression of semantic roles in the {Auslan} Corpus},
  pages     = {13--16},
  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/08020.pdf}
}
Something missing or wrong?