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Part of
Advances in Sign Language Corpus Linguistics
Edited by Ella Wehrmeyer
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 108] 2023
► pp. 192–218

Chapter 7
Exploring regional variation in the DGS Corpus

| University of Hamburg
| University of Hamburg
| University of Hamburg

The DGS Corpus was collected in order to document German Sign Language (DGS) for linguistic research, compile the corpus-based dictionary DW-DGS and provide a cultural resource for the language community. Regional aspects played a key role in participant selection, data collection tasks and procedures, as well as in annotation work. Regional granularity implemented had to be a compromise between research interests, corpus size, and privacy issues of participants. In the lexicographic work maps are used to visualize regional distribution of single signs as well as of groups of competing synonyms. Maps are a tool for data exploration, and they support data interpretation as well as quality assurance of the annotation. As they provide an intuitive access to distributional facts maps are also an important element in the dictionary.

Keywords: DGS corpus, German Sign Language, regional variation, lexicographic analysis, distributional maps, cluster maps
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1The German Sign Language community
    • 2.2Previous work on DGS involving corpus data
  • 3.The DGS Corpus
    • 3.1Data collection
      • 3.1.1Data collection regions
      • 3.1.2Participant selection criteria
      • 3.1.3Participant recruiting
      • 3.1.4Informed consent
      • 3.1.5Metadata
      • 3.1.6Elicitation tasks
      • 3.1.7Mobile studio
      • 3.1.8Recording
      • 3.1.9Review procedure
    • 3.2Corpus annotation
      • 3.2.1Translation
      • 3.2.2Segmentation
      • 3.2.3Mouthing and mouth gesture
      • 3.2.4Lemmatization (token-type matching) and form deviation
      • 3.2.5Type hierarchy and qualifiers
      • 3.2.6Non-tokens
    • 3.3Current data size
  • 4.Regional variation in the corpus
    • 4.1Methodological challenges
    • 4.2Visualization
    • 4.3Implementation
    • 4.4Maps as a way to explore variation and as a quality assurance measure
    • 4.5The colleague cluster
    • 4.6The water cluster
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 3 April 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.108.07han
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