The functions of relative clause constructions (RCC) should be ideally analyzed at the discourse level, since the occurrence of RCCs can be explained by looking at interlocutors’ use of grammatical and intonational means (cf. Fox and Thompson, 1990). To date, RCCs in sign language have been analyzed at the syntactic level with a special focus on cross-linguistic comparisons (see e.g. Pfau and Steinbach, 2005; Branchini and Donati, 2009). However, to our knowledge, there is no systematic corpus-based analysis of RCCs in sign languages so far. Since the elements of RCCs are mostly non-manual markers, it is often unclear how to capture and tag these elements together with the functions of RCCs. This question is discussed in light of corpus-based data from Turkish Sign Language. Following Biber et al. (2007), the corpus-based analysis of RCCs in TID follows the “top-down” approach. In spite of modality-specific issues, the steps in the process of annotation and identification of RCCs in TID fairly resemble this approach. The advantage of using these multiple steps is that the procedure not only captures the discourse functions of the RCCs but also identifies different strategies for creating RCCs based on linguistic forms.
@inproceedings{kubus:14026:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Kubu{\c s}, Okan},
title = {Discourse-based annotation of relative clause constructions in {Turkish} {Sign} {Language} ({TID}): A case study},
pages = {95--99},
editor = {Crasborn, Onno and Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Kristoffersen, Jette and Mesch, Johanna},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2014} 6th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Beyond the Manual Channel},
maintitle = {9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2014)},
publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
address = {Reykjavik, Iceland},
day = {31},
month = may,
year = {2014},
language = {english},
url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/14026.pdf}
}