sign-lang@LREC Anthology

You Get Out What You Put In: The Beginnings of Phonetic and Phonological Coding in the Signs of Ireland Digital Corpus

Thorvaldsdottir, Gudny Bjork


Volume:
Proceedings of the LREC2010 4th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Corpora and Sign Language Technologies
Venue:
Valletta, Malta
Date:
22 and 23 May 2010
Pages:
235–238
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
License:
CC BY-NC
sign-lang ID:
10016

Content Categories

Languages:
Irish Sign Language
Corpora:
Signs of Ireland

Abstract

This poster discusses a range of issues with respect to expanding the annotation of the Signs of Ireland (SOI) corpus to incorporate phonetic and phonological coding. This forms part of ongoing PHD research work that explores the phonology-morphology interface in Irish Sign Language (ISL).
The SOI corpus consists of over 40 narratives that have already been highly annotated: it contains glossed lexical signs, classifier constructions and non-manual features. Classifier handshapes have also been annotated. It is my intention to identify the phonemes and the allophones of ISL using the corpus and it is thus neccessary to incorporate a detailed annotation at the phonetic level.
In order to achieve this, a list of phonetic features for ISL must be identified. To date no research has been done in this area apart from basic work describing handshapes in ISL. Thus far, there is no agreement on the phonetic alphabet inventory for ISL: Ó’Baoill and Matthews (2000) identified 66 handshapes while Matthews (2005) identified 78. The issue of allophonic variation has not yet been tackled for this language.
For annotation purposes, challenges arise in terms of how handshapes are recorded: for example, of the 66 handshapes identified in Ó’Baoill and Matthews (2000), 28 are established as occurring as classifier handshapes also. These are annotated following ECHO project annotation norms (Nonhebel et al. 2004) where possible, with additional handshapes drawn from a list of 48 classifier handshapes described for BSL in Brennan (1992) using names like CL-B, CL-ISL-K etc. within the framework of the SOI corpus.
The other parameters that have traditionally been used to describe signs (i.e. location, movement and orientation) have not been researched in ISL at phonological or morphological level. All that currently exists is a vaguely phonetic level description of parameters respect to research on American Sign Languge (ASL) (See O’Baoill and Matthews 2000; Matthews 2005).
This poster outlines how, by drawing on Crasborn’s (2001) and van der Kooij’s (2002) work on Sign Language of the Netherlands (SLN), a list of phonetic features have been established for ISL and the changes to the original list of features that were required in order to accommodate ISL.
I also outline the factors influencing decisions regarding the coding and naming of handshapes at phonetic level. These include the question of whether already established naming conventions be maintained. For example, moving away from established protocols will result in inconsistencies within the annotations in the corpus. However, for the purposes of phonetic research a more elaborate coding might be necessary. Another challenge involves establishing what types of tiers are needed to accommodate the proposed research as well as future research at the phonetic and phonological level.

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@inproceedings{thorvaldsdottir:10016:sign-lang:lrec,
  author    = {Thorvaldsdottir, Gudny Bjork},
  title     = {You Get Out What You Put In: The Beginnings of Phonetic and Phonological Coding in the Signs of {Ireland} Digital Corpus},
  pages     = {235--238},
  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/10016.pdf}
}
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