Selected methodological challenges of sign language lexicography
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2020 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | Proceedings of the Conference on Language Technologies and Digital Humanities |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Web | http://nl.ijs.si/jtdh20/pdf/JT-DH_2020_Proceedings.pdf |
| Keywords | sign language; Czech; lexicography; dictionary |
| Description | Sign language lexicography, as a young field of study within sign language linguistics, faces a lot of challenges that have already been answered for the audio-oral language material. In this paper we present some of these challenges together with methods developed to help navigate the often problematic field of lexical classification that are being applied in the first Czech sign language online dictionary, a part of the platform Dictio. Among the covered topics are questions of lemmatisation and how to decide what constitutes a lexeme in sign language; what is the place of classifier constructions in a dictionary, given their peculiar semantic status; what is the proper treatment of mouthings and mouth gestures with respect to citation forms and derivation; why is it difficult in sign language to distinguish synonyms from variants and how can our proposed phonological criteria help; and, finally, what kinds of utterances are considered good examples of use. |
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