In this paper, we would like to discuss our current work on negation in Auslan (Australian Sign Language) and PJM (Polish Sign Language, polski język migowy) as an example of experience in using sign language corpus data for research purposes. We describe how we prepared the data for two detailed empirical studies, given similarities and differences between the Australian and Polish corpus projects. We present our findings on negation in both languages, which turn out to be surprisingly similar. At the same time, what the two corpus studies show seems to be quite different from many previous descriptions of sign language negation found in the literature. Some remarks on how to effectively plan and carry out the annotation process of sign language texts are outlined at the end of the present paper, as they might be helpful to other researchers working on designing a corpus. Our work leads to two main conclusions: (1) in many cases, usage data may not be easily reconciled with intuitions and assumptions about how sign languages function and what their grammatical characteristics are like, (2) in order to obtain representative and reliable data from large-scale corpora one needs to plan and carry out the annotation process very thoroughly.
@InProceedings{KUDER18.18033, author = {Anna Kuder ,Joanna Filipczak ,Piotr Mostowski ,Paweł Rutkowski and Trevor Johnston}, title = {What corpus-based research on negation in Auslan and PJM tells us about building and using sign language corpora}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)}, year = {2018}, month = {may}, date = {7-12}, location = {Miyazaki, Japan}, editor = {Mayumi Bono and Eleni Efthimiou and
Stavroula-Evita Fotinea and Thomas Hanke and
Julie Hochgesang and Jette Kristoffersen and
Johanna Mesch and Yutaka Osugi}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, address = {Paris, France}, isbn = {979-10-95546-01-6}, language = {english} }
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