There are approximately 300 deaf users of Icelandic Sign Language (Íslenskt táknmál, ITM). The first dictionary of ITM was published in 1976 and was last edited in 1988. The ITM dictionary is a wordlist consisting of illustrations of the signs, sometimes specially invented for the list’s purpose, presenting an Icelandic word or an inflected form of a common Icelandic verb and loans from Swedish and Danish Sign Language because it was considered that the total number of signs was insufficient. In 2004 The Association of Parents and Benefit Society of Hard of Hearing children subsidized a compilation of signs which was published on the Internet under the name The sign bank. The novelty is that signs are shown by ‘demo video clips’. Actual lexicographical work has not been done in this field in Iceland. These circumstances call for a compilation of an electronic dictionary of ITM based on linguistic principles and lexicographical methods. The facts that dictionary compilation for SL is in general time-consuming, expensive and the limited number of potential users similarly to ITM make the work on a dictionary of ITM very difficult. The dictionary project for ITM has been more or less at a theoretical stage during the last two years, starting in 2008 with a M.A. thesis on lexicographical description for an electronic dictionary of ITM on the basis of linguistic principles and in 2009 with a description of a lexical bilingual database for the dictionary compilation. At the same time in 2009 a list of 6441 signs was compiled by Deaf and hearing researchers at the Communication Centre for The Deaf and Hard of Hearing. Today in 2010 the project is on hold due to financial reasons. However, the electronic dictionary project of ITM is the first incisive research of ITM lexicon. The purpose with ITM dictionary with its 4000 entries, when published, is to give answers concerning sign’s base form, meaning and appropriate usage. This paper reports on the lexicographical description for construction of a dictionary for ITM. The author reviews briefly some theoretical issues regarding the dictionary’s project: the languages in the dictionary and its potential users, sign’s collection, evaluation and selection, the lemmatizing process, the dictionary entry, access structures, the dictionary article and two practical problems. The languages in the dictionary are Icelandic and ITM, with Icelandic as L1 and ITM as L2. Potential users of the dictionary include members of the general public interested in ITM; parents of Deaf children and their hearing friends, interpreters and hearing people teaching ITM, students in Sign Language studies, people who attend SL courses as well as the Deaf people themselves. Signs, thought to be every day vocabulary and used by most of the Deaf people, would to be found in the dictionary. The dictionary entry is a sign in its base form shown by ‘demo video clip’ and an Icelandic gloss. The lemma selection for lexical items with identical base form is influenced by mouth movements and mouth gestures as a lexicalized part of the lemma on the semantic level. The dictionary’s access structure requires every sign’s phonological description. With the potential users in mind, many access possibilities make the search for a sign easy and quick. It is possible to search in the dictionary after four criteria based on phonological structure of signs, after picture themes with illustrations and an Icelandic word. In the dictionary article phonological information is given by pictures which show sign’s handshape and location; sign’s meaning is given by Icelandic equivalent(s) or explanation(s); sign’s modification for subject-object verb agreement is shown by example and sign’s modification for plural is shown by link to the correspondent part in the explanatory grammar chapter in the dictionary. Information on the use of the entry is given by example which consists of ‘demo video clip’, sentence’s gloss and Icelandic translation. Practical problems concern e.g. the presentation of classifier predicates in the dictionary article and the low reliability of hearing researcher moderating discussion sessions with Deaf informants. In conclusion, the paper highlights the dictionary’s importance for (1) documentation and basic research of ITM and (2) getting legal recognition of the language.
@inproceedings{ivanova:10009:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Ivanova, Nedelina},
title = {The {Icelandic} sign language dictionary project: some theoretical issues},
pages = {125--128},
editor = {Dreuw, Philippe and Efthimiou, Eleni and Hanke, Thomas and Johnston, Trevor and Mart{\'i}nez Ruiz, Gregorio and Schembri, Adam},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2010} 4th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Corpora and Sign Language Technologies},
maintitle = {7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2010)},
publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
address = {Valletta, Malta},
day = {22--23},
month = may,
year = {2010},
language = {english},
url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/10009.pdf}
}