The theory of language structure informs us about what we should expect when we want to investigate a certain construction. However, reality is often richer than what theories predict. In this study, we start from a theoretically informed set of hypotheses about the structure of wh-questions in sign language, we test them using a sign language corpus, a designed production experiment, and structured fieldwork in three sign languages, Swedish, Greek and French Sign Languages. The results will inform us on what type of contribution each research method can provide to reach accurate language descriptions.
@inproceedings{gavrilescu:24037:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Gavrilescu, Robert and Geraci, Carlo and Mesch, Johanna},
title = {Content Questions in Sign Language -- From theory to language description via corpus, experiments, and fieldwork},
pages = {298--306},
editor = {Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Hochgesang, Julie A. and Mesch, Johanna and Schulder, Marc},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC-COLING} 2024 11th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Evaluation of Sign Language Resources},
maintitle = {2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC-COLING} 2024)},
publisher = {{ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA) and the International Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL)}},
address = {Torino, Italy},
day = {25},
month = may,
year = {2024},
isbn = {978-2-493814-30-2},
language = {english},
url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/24037.pdf}
}