The Philadelphia Signs Project emerged from the community‘s desire to document their local ASL variety, originating at the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf. This variety is anecdotally reported to be notably different from other ASL varieties. This project is founded upon the consistent observations of this marked difference. We aim to uncover what, if anything, makes the Philadelphia variety distinct from other varieties in the United States. Beyond some lexical items, it is unknown what linguistic features mark this variety as “different.” Comparison to other ASL varieties is difficult given the absence of a main and representative ASL corpus. This paper describes our sociolinguistic data collection methods, annotation procedures, and archiving approach. We summarize several preliminary observations about potentially dialect-specific features beyond the lexicon, such as unusual phonological alternations and word orders. Finally, we outline our plans to test these features with surveys for non-Philadelphians using Philadelphia lexical items, extending to more abstract phonological and syntactic features. This line of inquiry supplements our current archiving practices, facilitating comparison with a main corpus in the future. We maintain that even without a main corpus for comparison, it is essential to document a language variety when the community wishes to preserve it.
@inproceedings{fisher:16026:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Fisher, Jami N. and Hochgesang, Julie A. and Tamminga, Meredith},
title = {Examining Variation in the Absence of a 'Main' {ASL} Corpus: The Case of the Philadelphia Signs Project},
pages = {75--80},
editor = {Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Hochgesang, Julie A. and Kristoffersen, Jette and Mesch, Johanna},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2016} 7th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Corpus Mining},
maintitle = {10th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2016)},
publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
address = {Portoro{\v z}, Slovenia},
day = {28},
month = may,
year = {2016},
language = {english},
url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/16026.pdf}
}