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Part of
Advances in Sign Language Corpus Linguistics
Edited by Ella Wehrmeyer
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 108] 2023
► pp. 287–308

Chapter 11
W(h)ither the ASL corpus?

Considering trends in signed corpus development

| Gallaudet University
| Gallaudet University
| Gallaudet University

In this chapter, we discuss logistic and ideological practices used by signed language corpus projects around the world to develop their corpora, starting with Johnston’s early call to develop signed language corpora in 2004. We then outline a brief history of existing American Sign Language (ASL) corpora or corpus-like collections, most of which are specialized and/or inaccessible. We unpack the lessons we have learned as we, North American linguists interested in signed language research and corpora, have sought to create a national-level corpus following the standards set by earlier projects. We conclude that our contexts are somewhat different, and describe projects that we think would be better suited for our ASL communities. In other words, though our dreams of having a single national-level ASL corpus have ‘withered’, we remain optimistic that corpus methods can be used to catalog and analyze the wealth of ASL signing data currently available.

Keywords: American Sign Language (ASL), ASL communities, ASL corpus/corpora, signed language corpora, signed language documentation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Why ‘w(h)ither’?
  • 3.The US context
    • 3.1Cultural barriers to corpus work in the US
    • 3.2Systemic barriers to corpus work in the US
    • 3.3Material barriers to corpus work in the US
  • 4.Attempts to establish North American ASL corpora
    • 4.1Specialized corpora for ASL
    • 4.2Existing corpus-like ASL collections
    • 4.3Development of tools that work around the lack of corpus data
  • 5.Considering and problematizing some signed language corpus concepts and practices
    • 5.1‘Native’ signer bias
    • 5.2Defining the limits of ASL
    • 5.3‘Naturalistic’ data is authentic
  • 6.Whither the development of an ASL corpus?
  • 7.Going forward
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 3 April 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.108.11hoc
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