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Part of
Advances in Sign Language Corpus Linguistics
Edited by Ella Wehrmeyer
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 108] 2023
► pp. 262–286

Chapter 10
Overview of and epistemological conditions for building and using LSF corpora

| Structures Formelles du Langage, Université Paris 8, CNRS
| Structures Formelles du Langage, Université Paris 8, CNRS

This chapter discusses French Sign Language (LSF) corpora and how they have evolved over the last thirty years in France. We first outline the epistemological and social conditions in which corpora were constructed by the pioneers of the field to explain how, in our opinion, their corpus-driven approach was decisive and very specific to France. Second, we focus on the theoretical framework we use, namely the Semiological Approach, and on the corpus-driven linguistics underlying this approach. On these bases, we present various LSF corpora that exist today, with particular focus on the two main corpora designed by our team, namely LS-Colin and Creagest, with special attention to data collected from deaf children. We then highlight how our own relationship with corpus data remains fundamental and heuristic.

Keywords: French Sign Language corpora, Semiological Approach, LS-Colin corpus, Creagest corpus
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Construction of French Sign Language as a scientific object: A corpus-driven versus corpus-based approach
    • 2.1The Semiological Approach
  • 3.Compilation of LSF corpora
    • 3.1LS-Colin corpus
    • 3.2Creagest corpus
      • 3.2.1Creagest-Dialogues corpus
      • 3.2.2Creagest-Acquisition corpus
      • 3.2.3LSF corpora as a contribution to corpus linguistics
    • 3.3Other LSF corpora
      • 3.3.1Corpora produced according to the LS-Colin or Creagest corpora methodology
      • 3.3.2Corpora produced in different contexts
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 3 April 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.108.10sal
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