LESCO is the most widely used sign language among Deaf people in Costa Rica (Woodward 1992). There are no precise figures available on the number of LESCO users, who live mostly in urban areas of the Central Valley of the country. Between 2010 and 2013 the Costa Rican government funded a project for a first linguistic description of LESCO, as a step towards recognition of the rights of Deaf people. The study of LESCO was based on the Corpus LESCO, a group of transcribed videos collected from Deaf signers from the main cities of the country along 2011. The project was carried on by a group consisted of five Deaf native LESCO-users and a hearing person with a good command of this sign language. A series of interviews were done over several months throughout the country allowing a pre-selection of 102 potential informants (all of them attesting a relative early LESCO acquisition, frequent use of LESCO, high degree of hearing-impairment, etc.). These people were video-recorded and so nearly 200 video-files (over 2000 minutes of footage) were obtained. Films included induced stories, life stories, free dialogues and interviews. For an initial description of the language, a selection of 44 files was transcribed on the basis of ELAN. Variants of each sign were identified and assigned to a particular lexeme. This process allowed the definition of more than 1,500 lemmas (Johnston 2010) from a total of around 14,000 lexical occurrences. The Corpus LESCO underpinned the construction of a basic dictionary (1,100 entries) and the drafting of a basic descriptive grammar of this sign language. Both dictionary and grammar are available online since the beginning of 2014 (www.cenarec-lesco.org). These works are the second corpus-based descriptions of a signed language in Spanish speaking Latin America. A previous experienced was carried of in Colombia between 2000 and 2005 (Oviedo 2001, CyC 2005). The initial project did not include the extension of the corpus. Both the Corpus LESCO and the rest of videos collected during the project are archived by the institution that administered the project in Costa Rica. The poster offers details about the process of building up the corpus and about its main characteristics. References CyC (Instituto Caro y Cuervo) (2005). Diccionario Básico de la Lengua de Señas Colombiana. Bogotá: INSOR-Instituto Caro y Cuervo. Johnston, T. (2010). From archive to corpus: Transcription and annotation in the creation of signed language corpora. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 15(1). pp. 106-131. Oviedo, A. (2001). Apuntes para una gramática de la Lengua de Señas Colombiana. Cali: Universidad del Valle/INSOR. Woodward, J. (1991). Sign language varieties in Costa Rica. Sign Language Studies (20), pp. 329-334.
Keywords
Language documentation and long-term accessibility for sign language data
Experiences in building sign language corpora
Experiences from linguistic research using corpora
@inproceedings{oviedo:18004:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Oviedo, Alejandro and Ram{\'i}rez Valerio, Christian},
title = {The {LESCO} Corpus. Data for the Description of {Costa} {Rican} {Sign} {Language}},
pages = {167--170},
editor = {Bono, Mayumi and Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Hochgesang, Julie A. and Kristoffersen, Jette and Mesch, Johanna and Osugi, Yutaka},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2018} 8th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Involving the Language Community},
maintitle = {11th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2018)},
publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
address = {Miyazaki, Japan},
day = {12},
month = may,
year = {2018},
isbn = {979-10-95546-01-6},
language = {english},
url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/18004.pdf}
}