Cover not available
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
References (30)
References
Audeoud, Mireille, Becker, Claudia, Krausneker, Verena & Tarcsiová, Darina. 2017. Bimodal-bilinguale Bildung für Kinder mit Hörbehinderung in Europa – Teil III: Sprachbildung für hörbehinderte SchülerInnen in den deutschsprachigen Ländern. Das Zeichen 107: 416–429. <[URL]> (8 July 2022).
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1933/1965. Language. London: Allen & Unwin.Google Scholar
Brockmann, Elisabeth & Kozelka, Elena. 2021. Forced sterilization of deaf people during the German Nazi Regime – A trauma and its compensations after 1945. In Our Lives – Our Stories, Roland Pfau, Asli Göksel & Jana Hosemann (eds), 197–216. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Crasborn, Onno. 2010. What does ‘informed consent’ mean in the internet age? Publishing sign language corpora as open content. Sign Language Studies 10(2): 276–90. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Crasborn, Onno & Hanke, Thomas. 2003. Additions to the IMDI metadata set for sign language corpora. Agreements at an ECHO workshop, 8–9 May, 2003, Nijmegen. <[URL]> (8 July 2022).
Deutscher Bundestag – Wissenschaftliche Dienste. 2018. WD 9 – 3000 – 016/18: Cochlea-Implantate. <[URL]> (8 July 2022).
. 2020. WD 10 – 3000 – 002/20: Rechtliche Stellung der Gebärdensprache in europäischen Staaten. <[URL]> (8 July 2022).
Ebbinghaus, Horst. 1997. Integration deutscher Wortformen in gebärdensprachliche Äußerungen. Unpublished final report for the German Research Foundation (DFG).Google Scholar
Ebbinghaus, Horst & Hessmann, Jens. 2001. Sign language as multidimensional communication: Why manual signs, mouthings, and mouth gestures are three different things. In The Hands are the Head of the Mouth: The Mouth as Articulator in Sign Languages, Penny Boyes Braem & Rachel Sutton-Spence (eds), 133–151. Hamburg: Signum.Google Scholar
Evert, Stephan. 2006. How random is a corpus? The library metaphor. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 54(2): 177–190. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hanke, Thomas. 2002. iLex – A tool for Sign language lexicography and corpus analysis. In: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2002), Manuel González Rodríguez & Carmen Paz Suarez Araujo (eds), 923–926. Paris: ELRA. <[URL]> (12 Aug 2022).Google Scholar
. 2004. HamNoSys. Representing sign language data in language resources and language processing contexts. In Proceedings of the Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages (LREC 2004), Oliver Streiter & Chiara Vettori (eds), 1–6. Paris: ELRA. <[URL]> (8 July 2022).
Hanke, Thomas & Storz, Jakob. 2008. iLex – A database tool for integrating sign language corpus linguistics and sign language lexicography. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Construction and Exploitation of Sign Language Corpora, Onno Crasborn, Eleni Efthimiou, Thomas Hanke, Ernst Thoutenhoofd & Inge Zwitserlood (eds), 64–67. Paris: ELRA. <[URL]> (8 July 2022).
Hanke, Thomas, Hong, Sung-Eun, König, Susanne, Langer, Gabriele, Nishio, Rie & Rathmann, Christian. 2010. Towards fair licences for data from the DGS Corpus Project. Poster at the 4th Workshop of the Sign Language Corpus Network: Exploitation (SLCN 4), Berlin, 3–4 December, 2010. DOI logo
Hessmann, Jens. 2001a. GEHÖRLOS SO! Materialien zur Gebärdensprache, Vol. 1: Grundlagen und Gebärdenverzeichnis; Vol. 2: Gebärdensprachtexte. Hamburg: Signum.Google Scholar
. 2001b. GEHÖRLOS SO! Materialien zur Gebärdensprache [Video]. Hamburg: Signum.Google Scholar
Isard, Amy. 2020. Approaches to the anonymization of sign language corpora. In Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Sign Language Resources in the Service of the Language Community, Technological Challenges and Application Perspectives (LREC 2020), Eleni Efthimiou, Evita-Stavroula Fotinea, Thomas Hanke, Julie Hochgesang, Jette Kristoffersen & Johanna Mesch (eds), 95–100. Paris: ELRA. <[URL]> (8 July 2022).
Johnston, Trevor. 2004. W(h)ither the Deaf community? Population, genetics, and the future of Australian Sign Language. American Annals of the Deaf 148(5): 358–375. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2010. From archive to corpus: Transcription and annotation in the creation of signed language corpora. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 15(1): 106–131. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kimmelman, Vadim, Komarova, Anna, Luchkova, Lyudmila, Vinogradova, Valeria & Alekseeva, Oksana. 2022. Exploring networks of lexical variation in Russian Sign Language. Frontiers in Psychology 12:740734. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
König, Susanne, Reiner, Konrad & Langer, Gabriele. 2008. What’s in a sign? Theoretical lessons from practical sign language lexicography. In Signs of the Time. Selected Papers from TISLR 2004, Josep Quer (ed.), 379–404. Hamburg: Signum.Google Scholar
Konrad, Reiner. 2011. Die Erstellung von Fachgebärdenlexika am Institut für Deutsche Gebärdensprache (IDGS) der Universität Hamburg (1993–2010). Universität Hamburg. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Konrad, Reiner & Langer, Gabriele. 2012. Fachgebärdenlexikographie am Institut für Deutsche Gebärdensprache. eDITion. Fachzeitschrift für Terminologie 1: 13–17.Google Scholar
Konrad, Reiner, Hanke, Thomas, Langer, Gabriele, König, Susanne, König, Lutz, Nishio, Rie & Regen, Anja. 2022. Public DGS Corpus: Annotation conventions (Version 4.1; 2022, June 14). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Langer, Gabriele, Hanke, Thomas, Konrad, Reiner & König, Susanne. 2016. “Non-tokens”: When tokens should not count as evidence of sign use. In Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Corpus Mining. Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2016), Eleni Efthimiou, Evita-Stavroula Fotinea, Thomas Hanke, Julie Hochgesang, Jette Kristofffersen & Johanna Mesch (eds), 137–142. Paris: ELRA. <[URL]> (8 July 2022).
Loos, Cornelia & Konrad, Reiner. 2022. Detailed annotation and qualifiers, version 1. DGS-Korpus project note AP03-2021-01. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McKee, Rachel. 2017. Assessing the vitality of New Zealand Sign Language. Sign Language Studies 17(3): 322–362. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rathmann, Christian & Geissler, Thomas. 2020. Modality effects in phonological, lexical and spatial development in L2/M2 learners of German Sign Language in the first semester: A corpus-based investigation. Paper presented at the 42nd Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGFS), March 4–6, Hamburg.
Schulder, Marc, Blanck, Dolly, Hanke, Thomas, Hofmann, Ilona, Hong, Sung-Eun, Jeziorski, Olga, König, Lutz, König, Susanne, Konrad, Reiner, Langer, Gabriele, Nishio, Rie & Rathmann, Christian. 2021. Data Statement for the Public DGS Corpus, version 2. DGS-Korpus project note AP06-2020-01. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Statistisches Bundesamt. 2020. Bevölkerung: Deutschland, Stichtag. <[URL]> (8 July 2022).