Sign language, being a visual-gestural language, can also be used tactually among or with deaf people who become blind. When this language is shared between people who are totally blind, non-manual features of signs are totally neutralised, resulting into a purely kinesthetic-gestural variant of sign language. This tactile modality of reception leads to adjustments impacting sign language pragmatics, as well as sign order and to a lesser extent, the way signs are formed. We aim to explore these phenomena by carrying out a systematic analysis of tactile sign language corpora. Such a corpus has been filmed in 2006, involving six French deafblind informants, all of them using tactile sign language as their primary means of communication. A total of 14 hours of spontaneous discussions, free conversations or elicited data were captured by up to three digital cameras. In order thoroughly to analyse our corpus, we need the help of a reliable annotation tool. After trying a couple of them, we decided to select Anvil, for its visual layout and flexibility, as well as its temporal granularity. We need a partition annotation system which allows us to create, rename or reorder tracks freely even while annotating. The first steps of our annotation will take us on the lanes of conversational analysis, using a mix of glosses and pragmatic occurrences, eventually to lead us on the more sinuous paths of a syntactic micro-analysis.
@inproceedings{schwartz:08032:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Schwartz, Sandrine},
title = {Tactile sign language corpora: capture and annotation issues},
pages = {170--173},
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/08032.pdf}
}