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Sign Language Corpora
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<div><font color="#000000">Dear Carmen and Immaculda,<br>
<br>
Your project seems to be an interesting one. In 1998 at our Deaf
Studies Research Unit we compiled and analyzed a transcribed corpus
of about 100,000 sign tokens. The Wellington Corpus of New Zealand
Sign Language has been compiled from the natural discourse of native
speakers NZSL in a variety of sociolinguistic and functional
contexts. I transcribed the videotapes assigning a gloss in English
for each sign, and then the corpus was analyzed using WordSmith. Work
is ongoing and the size of the corpus will be expanded as opportunity
allows. There is scope for a great deal of corpus-based research on
the grammar and lexis of NZSL. The references to our papers
are:</font></div>
<blockquote><font color="#000000">Kennedy, Graeme and McKee, David
(1999) 'The Distribution of Signs in New Zealand Sign Language' in
Graeme Kennedy (ed.) New Zealand Sign Language: Distribution,
Origins, Reference. Deaf Studies Research Unit Occasional
Publication 2.</font></blockquote>
<blockquote><font color="#000000"><br></font></blockquote>
<blockquote><font color="#000000">McKee, David (1999) 'A List of
1,000 Frequently-used Signs in New Zealand Sign Language' in Graeme
Kennedy (ed.) New Zealand Sign Language: Distribution, Origins,
Reference. Deaf Studies Research Unit Occasional
Publication 2.</font></blockquote>
<div><font color="#000000"><br>
You may wish to consider using Sign Stream, a new program developed
at Boston University for recording signs from videotapes. Check out
this website:<br>
<br>
http://www.bu.edu/asllrp/SignStream/<br>
<br>
Our data was transcribed entirely in a word processor program
(Microsoft Word). It makes it difficult for us to retrieve certain
data from text files, although WordSmith can do certain tasks but not
everything. Sign Stream seems promising for corpus work.<br>
<br>
Sincerely,<br>
<br>
David McKee<br>
Deaf Studies Research Unit<br>
Victoria University of Wellington<br>
New Zealand<br>
David.McKee@vuw.ac.nz<br>
<br>
</font></div>
<blockquote><font color="#000000">Carmen Cabeza
wrote:</font></blockquote>
<blockquote><font color="#000000"><br></font></blockquote>
<blockquote><font color="#000000">Dear networkers,</font></blockquote>
<blockquote><font color="#000000"><br></font></blockquote>
<blockquote><font color="#000000">We are a group of researchers at
the University of Vigo (Spain) working in the creation of a
linguistic Spanish Sign Language Corpus. Our main goal is to store a
body of natural discourse in SSL having native speakers as
informants. The corpus will be representative of social variation,
with special attention to differences in sex and age groups.
Currently we are particularly engaged with the recording of
interviews where both the informant and the interviewer are deaf. We
would like to have information about similar projects. Could anyone
help us?</font></blockquote>
<blockquote><font color="#000000">We are also interested in
compilation and automatic analysis (the Uvigo SL Corpus is still in
video-format, but ready to be computerized). Thanking you in
advance.</font></blockquote>
<blockquote><font color="#000000"><br></font></blockquote>
<blockquote><font color="#000000">Best wishes,</font></blockquote>
<blockquote><font color="#000000"><br></font></blockquote>
<blockquote><font color="#000000">Carmen Cabeza & Inmaculada
B=E1ez</font></blockquote>
<blockquote><font color="#000000">University of Vigo</font><br>
</blockquote>
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