The aim of this paper is to discuss some methodological issues that emerged during the creation of a corpus of data for Italian Sign Language, LIS. Data were collected from 10 cities spread across the country. 18 signers from each city have been recruited. They are native speakers of LIS or later-exposed to LIS and are divided into 3 age groups (19-38, 39-58, 59-78) of 6 signers each (3 males and 3 females). The methodology of data collection and transcription is similar to that used in previous studies of variation in American Sign Language (Lucas, Bayley & Valli 2001) and Australian Sign Language (Johnston & Schembri 2006), with some differences that we discuss. The corpus consists of various kinds of texts collected with different strategies: free conversation (45 minutes), elicited dialogues (about 5-10 minutes), narration (10 minutes) and a picture-naming task (42 items). For the transcription we adopted the ELAN software (Johnston & Crasborn 2006). Finally, a brief report on some preliminary results is presented.
@inproceedings{geraci:10023:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Geraci, Carlo and Bayley, Robert and Branchini, Chiara and Cardinaletti, Anna and Cecchetto, Carlo and Donati, Caterina and Giudice, Serena and Mereghetti, Emiliano and Poletti, Fabio and Santoro, Mirko and Zucchi, Sandro},
title = {Building a corpus for {Italian} {Sign} {Language}. Methodological issues and some preliminary results},
pages = {98--101},
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/10023.pdf}
}