In this work in progress procedures for analyzing and displaying distributional patterns of sign variants have been developed and tested on data for color signs elicited by the DGS Corpus Project. The data for this preliminary study were elicited as isolated signs and have been made accessible through spot annotations in iLex. The annotations had not been lemma revised but nevertheless revealed some interesting insights. Several color signs exhibited a high degree of variation. The distributional maps showed that a number of signs were mainly used in certain regions and thus provided evidence on dialectal differences within DGS. The relevant information necessary to generate distributional maps have been directly extracted via SQL-statements from the corpus and fed into R. The approach is data driven. The distributional maps show either the distribution of one sign form (variant) or of several different variants in relation to each other. Analyses of regional distribution as displayed by the distributional maps may support the annotation and lemma revision process and are a valuable basis for a lexicographical description of signs and their use as needed for compiling dictionary entries. A refined procedure to take multiple regional influences on informants into account for analysis is proposed.
@inproceedings{langer:12017:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Langer, Gabriele},
title = {A colorful first glance at data on regional variation extracted from the {DGS-Corpus}: With a focus on procedures},
pages = {101--108},
editor = {Crasborn, Onno and Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Kristoffersen, Jette and Mesch, Johanna},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2012} 5th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Interactions between Corpus and Lexicon},
maintitle = {8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2012)},
publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
address = {Istanbul, Turkey},
day = {27},
month = may,
year = {2012},
language = {english},
url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/12017.pdf}
}
