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Corpus research on signed languages in the Nordic countries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 September 2024

Tommi Jantunen Open the ORCID record for Tommi Jantunen [Opens in a new window] ,
Johanna Mesch  and
Lindsay Ferrara
Tommi Jantunen*
Affiliation:
Sign Language Centre, Department of Language and Communication Studies, PO Box 35, FI-40014 University of Jyväskylä, Finland
Johanna Mesch
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University, SE-10691 Stockholm, Sweden
Lindsay Ferrara
Affiliation:
c/o Department of Language and Literature, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Mailbox 8900, NO-7491 Trondheim, Norway
*
Corresponding author: Tommi Jantunen; Email: tommi.j.jantunen@jyu.fi

Abstract

This semi-systematic literature review examines signed language corpus research in the Nordic countries, with a quantitative and qualitative assessment of corpus research. The article first describes some critical components and functionalities of signed language corpora. It then outlines the evolution of Nordic corpus research, highlighting Sweden’s pioneering role and subsequent developments in Finland and Norway. The findings suggest a progression from method-focused publications to those exploring linguistic phenomena within and across (signed) languages. Although the number of research publications is modest, there is a discernible shift towards comparative studies and applications in signed language teaching and learning.

Keywords

corpus researchFinnish Sign Languageliterature reviewNordic signed languagesNorwegian Sign Languagesigned language corporaSwedish Sign Language
Type
Short Communication
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , First View , pp. 1 - 14
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Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Nordic Association of Linguists

1. Introduction

Over the past 50 years, there has been a growing interest in how (deaf) signers use their languages in different interactional settings. To investigate this, researchers have already created signed language corpora for over ten (mostly Western) signed languages (see Börstell Reference Börstell, Fenlon and Hochgesang2022, Fenlon & Hochgesang Reference Fenlon, Hochgesang, Fenlon and Hochgesang2022) and have engaged corpus linguistic methodology to investigate a range of research questions from phonology to morphology, from syntax to interaction.Footnote 1 In this brief review article, we reflect on work that utilizes signed language corpora, specifically focusing on the Nordic context, in order to outline the historical development and contribution of this research and to provide insight into possible future research trajectories. By taking stock of where the field has been and where it might be going, we are better positioned to engage Nordic signed language corpora to improve our documentation and understanding of this group of minority languages.

In the following sections, we first introduce signed language corpora and their characteristics. Then we introduce the Nordic signed language corpora that are currently being created and used in the Nordic countries. Next, we detail how we carried out a semi-systematic literature review of Nordic signed language corpus research. Finally, we present our findings on the distribution of previous research across time and geography, along with the various topics of analysis. This will help us conclude with reflections on the historical development and hypotheses regarding future research trajectories in the field of signed language corpus linguistics in the Nordic countries.

2. Introducing (Nordic) signed language corpora

Before providing an overview of the major signed language corpora in the Nordic countries, we briefly introduce what constitutes a signed language corpus, as these characteristics were used to vet the data used in research publications about Nordic signed languages. Firstly, a linguistic corpus aims to be a large, representative sample of a language (McEnery & Wilson Reference McEnery and Wilson2001, Johnston Reference Johnston2010, Fenlon & Hochgesang Reference Fenlon, Hochgesang, Fenlon and Hochgesang2022). Such corpora work to document the language use of a relatively large group of signers/speakers, who exhibit different socio-linguistic characteristics (e.g. age, gender, level of education, etc.), as they interact in different contexts. Such representativeness is essential, because it allows research involving these language resources to make certain types of generalizations about the language, even generalizations about variation, a key feature of language (Biber, Conrad & Reppen Reference Biber, Conrad and Reppen1998).

Second, a linguistic corpus must be machine-readable (McEnery & Wilson Reference McEnery and Wilson2001, Johnston Reference Johnston2010, Fenlon & Hochgesang Reference Fenlon, Hochgesang, Fenlon and Hochgesang2022). For signed language corpora, that means that video-recordings of the language must be accompanied by time-aligned, structured text annotations (Johnston Reference Johnston2010, Johnston & Schembri Reference Johnston, Schembri and Chapelle2013). These text annotations are typically sign or translation level codes providing access to the continuous visual-gestural language produced in the videos. They are necessary to facilitate computer-assisted searches across the data. Signed language corpus annotation is mainly manual work, requiring time, and it is usually carried out in purpose-built software, such as ELAN (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics; see Crasborn & Sloetjes Reference Crasborn and Sloetjes2008).

A third characteristic of (signed) language corpora is their availability to the language community and researchers (McEnery & Wilson Reference McEnery and Wilson2001, Fenlon & Hochgesang Reference Fenlon, Hochgesang, Fenlon and Hochgesang2022). In these modern times, a corpus should be accessible via the Internet. Different parts of a corpus may be regulated by different licenses, from Creative Commons licenses to more restricted academic licenses. Accessibility and availability of the corpus must also adhere to applicable privacy laws and ethical practices.

Over the years, many datasets of signed language materials have been collected across the Nordic countries. However, only four of these datasets – collected in Finland, Sweden, and Norway – meet the three criteria to be considered a fully fledged corpus.Footnote 2 These corpora are introduced in Table 1 along with details regarding their representativeness (number of signers), machine-readability (number of sign annotations), and accessibility (publication details). In Finland and Sweden, there exist also several smaller datasets that are referred to as a ‘corpus’ but that either do not meet the above listed criteria for corpushood or include ‘specialized’ language data, e.g. from L2 users only. Our analysis here includes literature engaging the four corpora in Table 1.

Table 1. The four large signed language corpora in the Nordic countries

* Individual signs, just like individual words in spoken language corpora, provide an indication of the size of a corpus. However, it should be kept in mind that this number does not comment on the total number of annotations across the corpora, as much annotation work focuses on various other (linguistic) features of the data.

3. Review questions and method

In order to reflect on the historical development of signed language corpus linguistics in the Nordic countries and to hypothesize about future research trajectories in the field, we conducted a semi-systematic literature review. This type of literature review is suitable for content analysis as well as for some types of quantitative investigations (e.g. Snyder Reference Snyder2019). In particular, semi-systematic literature reviews are used for topics that have been studied by different groups of researchers in different disciplines (Snyder Reference Snyder2019:335), such as linguistics and computer science in our case. Semi-systematic reviews also look at how research within a selected field has progressed over time and, for example, seek to identify and understand – with the help of meta-narratives rather than by measuring effect size – potentially relevant research traditions that have implications for the topic under study (Snyder Reference Snyder2019:336).

To carry out the review we collected all signed language corpus research publications from Finland, Sweden, and Norway that have been published or accepted for publication up until May 2024. We believed this a feasible goal, since the field is very small and the three authors have first-hand knowledge of most of the work. In fact, they are the ones who created and/or have been in charge of the corpora and their construction and have overseen (academically and/or as restricted access granters) all work that engages the corpora. Once a full list of publications was collated from the three countries they were vetted against three further criteria.

  1. (i) The publication engaged primarily one or more of the Nordic signed language corpora presented in Table 1.

  2. (ii) The publication is or will be associated with an ISSN or ISBN.

  3. (iii) The publication reports original research in a broad sense, including original technology, methodology, and research infrastructure development reports.

Criterion (i) was the main determinant of the data. In practice, this criterion excluded all studies where a corpus listed in Table 1 was not used, or were so-called mixed-materials studies where the corpus was used only marginally to support other data and research conclusions. Criterion (ii) restricted the data to publications that had already been published or were accepted for publication. Research known to be submitted for publication or under review was excluded. The criterion also meant that unpublished theses (e.g. MA theses) were not considered. Criterion (iii) excluded reviews and, for example, position papers.

The resulting literature data (see the Appendix) were then scrutinized quantitatively for frequency and then also qualitatively for goals and topics. As part of the frequency analysis the data was initially observed to fall across three general functional categories. Some publications were found to describe the construction of the corpus or the development of annotation methods (labeled as ‘methods’). Others focused heavily on specific linguistic phenomena within an individual signed language, such as word order or turn-taking (‘single language’). And some of the corpus publications emphasized the comparison of two or more signed languages (‘comparative’).

Next, the papers analyzed as either ‘single language’ or ‘comparative’ were then subjected to an iterated, detailed qualitative topic analysis. Upon a first parse, we assessed the publications against the stated goals of corpus linguistic research put forth by Biber, Reppen & Friginal (Reference Biber, Reppen, Friginal and Kaplan2012): describing linguistic features, describing linguistic varieties, and contributing to language learning and teaching. Then, in order to help us compare the work that has been done across the Nordics, we conducted another parse that classified the papers in terms of general topics of research. The topics were drawn from the publications’ headings, abstracts, and keywords. Topics were summarized in single words or short phrases. The findings from this analysis work are reported below in Section 4.

4. Number and types of corpus research on signed languages in the Nordic countries

In total, there have been 53 publications using signed language corpora in the Nordic countries (the full list is reported in the Appendix). The distribution of the publications across the four signed languages (see Table 2) shows that STS (svenskt teckenspråk, Swedish Sign Language) has the most published research, followed by SVK (suomalainen viittomakieli, Finnish Sign Language) and then NTS (norsk tegnspråk, Norwegian Sign Language). For FSTS (finlandssvenskt teckenspråk, Finland-Swedish Sign Language), there is currently only one corpus publication.

Table 2. Corpus publications and their main function per four Nordic signed languages

Note that if the language-specific total numbers of Table 2 are added together, the total comes to 58 publications. This is because some publications are joint publications, dealing with multiple Nordic signed languages and thus falling under multiple language categories.

Table 2 also provides a breakdown of the main functional category of the publications for each signed language. For example, if we look at publications on SVK, we can see that seven fall into the ‘methods’ and seven into the ‘single language’ categories. The smallest category for SVK is ‘comparative’ with four publications.

In SVK and STS, there has been a relatively substantial number of publications describing the different phases of the corpus work and corpus construction (the ‘methods’ category). Also, the only publication on FSTS is a ‘methods’ publication. In contrast, there are no such methods publications for NTS. Moving to the ‘single language’ publications, SVK, STS, and NTS are on an equal footing. Finally, comparative work (the third functional category) has been carried out the most for STS.

To remind the reader, the goals of corpus research, as presented by Biber, Reppen & Friginal (Reference Biber, Reppen, Friginal and Kaplan2012), involve describing linguistic features, describing linguistic varieties, and contributing to language learning and teaching. Each relevant (i.e. non-method) publication was next examined for these three goals and the results of this part of the analysis are summarized in Table 3. Overwhelmingly, corpus research publications have focused on describing specific linguistic features of SVK, STS, and NTS (remember that FSTS did not have any language-specific or comparative research publications). In Finland, there has also been an interest in language variation, such as differences in language use registers. Such a perspective has not been investigated in the other signed languages. Additionally, research on signed language learning and teaching has been carried out to some extent in Finland and Sweden, and Sweden in particular has been the forerunner in this field. Sweden’s leading role in the field of language learning and teaching can also be seen in the fact that Sweden is the only Nordic country that has a dedicated L2 ‘corpus’ (see Section 2), a dataset not included in this study.

Table 3. The primary goal of non-method papers

Table 4 provides a closer qualitative look at the specific linguistic phenomena that have been examined in SVK, STS, and NTS using corpora. In SVK, research has investigated both the phenomena of traditional grammar and prosody as well as more non-conventional ways to make meaning. In STS, in addition to grammatical features, corpus research has been characterized by its interest in the use of the body in the context of discourse and its maintenance. NTS corpus research also has a strong discursive focus and is characterized by a particular interest in different semiotic resources, such as indexicality and depiction. So far, reference is the only common topic investigated across all three languages.

Table 4. The main topics of papers that describe single linguistic features or varieties. Bold text indicates common research themes

5. Development of corpus research on signed languages in the Nordic countries

Findings presented in the previous section showed that STS has the most corpus research publications (n = 33), followed by SVK (n = 18) and NTS (n = 6). So far, FSTS has only one publication. We can explain this difference in publication numbers by looking at the timeline of corpus research for each language, presented in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Timeline of corpus publications per four Nordic signed languages. The bigger the circle the more publications that year. The smallest circle corresponds to one publication, the largest to three.

The timeline shows the significant head start Sweden has had in the field of signed language corpus research. The work engaging signed language corpora in Sweden began soon after the turn of the millennium, resulting in a first publication in 2007. Finland began corpus work in 2013 and Norway in 2015. Initial publications came afterwards in 2014 and in 2019, respectively. The work on the FSTS corpus is as an extension of the SVK corpus work, as the videos were recorded as a part of the same recording process between 2014 and 2017 (see Salonen et al. Reference Salonen, Andersson-Koski, Hoyer and Jantunen2022). However, the actual work of annotating the materials for the FSTS corpus began only in 2021, which explains the low number of dedicated publications to date.

The distribution of the three functional publication categories along the timeline reflects the early need to document corpus construction methods, technologies, and processes. The majority of STS publications before 2015 (n = 8) are categorized as ‘methods’ and in Sweden the reporting of methods has continued to the present date. Focus on methods papers in one form or another is also evident in SVK and FSTS. NTS is the exception with no publications focusing on methods. While this is likely to change in the future, the authors’ first-hand knowledge (see Section 3) suggests that multiple ‘methods’ publications are not expected for NTS. This is mostly because to date (May 2024) there is already sufficient work published in the Nordics and internationally that addresses the various aspects of building and annotating signed language corpora. As a result, work using the NTS corpus is expected to continue on the path of doing empirical research on the language – an obvious direction of corpus work for other signed languages too (see Börstell Reference Börstell, Fenlon and Hochgesang2022).

Overall, the timeline in Figure 1 shows that there has been a gradual shift in numbers from method-focused publications to language-specific and comparative research of Nordic signed languages. The timeline also shows that although the number of corpus research publications has increased over the past twenty years, the total number of publications (n = 53) is still relatively low. One factor explaining this relates to the capacity of each country and the researchers working with signed language corpora. For example, in Norway, there is a general lack of signed language linguists trained in corpus annotation, methods, and analysis. This limits how much research can be conducted on the language. Another factor relates to the slow speed of the corpus building process. Because of the amount of data and share of manual work, signed language corpus construction is a slow process. Evidence for this is found in Table 1, where it is reported that basic annotation work for all large corpora except the one for STS, after twelve years of annotation work, is still in progress.

The slow pace of annotation is clearly reflected in publication numbers and types. In moving forward, we wonder if we should be exploring calls for the development of assistive technology or even considering a change in research culture. The question of how much manual work needs and ought to be done in constructing a signed language corpus could be reconsidered. This applies to annotation work in particular: because annotation work is the slowest part of corpus building, it may be that the way annotation work is carried out needs revision. Obviously, a signed language corpus will still need to be machine-readable (see Section 2), but perhaps we can reconsider what basic annotation work (i.e. typically the identification and labeling of signs as well as the creation of sentence-level translations) must be done before other annotation work can be carried out – it is typically only the latter, research topic-focused round of annotation (i.e. the research question-guided annotation done on top of the basic annotation) that is needed when investigating a particular research question.

Overall, we hypothesize that the future of signed language corpus research will likely emphasize the role of comparative research. This trend is already evident in the Nordic corpus signed language work (Figure 1). Now that signed language corpora are more established and have a certain level of basic annotation, comparative studies will be more feasible. Another prediction is that corpus research contributing to signed language learning and teaching will increase in the near future. So far, Sweden has led the way in this area, while in the other Nordic countries the use of corpora for teaching and learning is mainly in its infancy or still in planning stages. This hypothesis is further supported by the fact that the Nordic signed language corpora are all overseen by researchers whose institutions have signed language-dedicated educational programs.

6. Conclusion

This article has been a semi-systematic literature review of corpus research on signed languages in the Nordic countries. In general, the review has shown how research has progressed in Sweden, Finland, and Norway alongside corpus-building processes which partly have kept the total number of corpus research publications relatively modest. However, at the same time, corpora have been built successfully, and over the past twenty years, research exploiting corpora has transitioned from method-focused publications to topics focusing on various linguistic phenomena. Undeniably, the topics investigated have already added to our understanding of (signed) language structure and variation within the signing communities. In the future, the role of comparative research is expected to increase, as are corpus studies linked to signed language learning and teaching. In these fields, because of the small scale of the signed language corpus research field, Nordic research has potential to have a global impact as well.

Acknowledgements

This article is based on a talk presented for the first time at a symposium on FSTS held at the University of Helsinki in Finland on 3–4 November 2022. A second and updated version of the talk was presented at the 3rd Nordic Signed Language Corpus Network workshop, funded by the NOS-HS (The Joint Committee for Nordic research councils in the Humanities and Social Sciences), in Trondheim, Norway, on 12–13 October 2023. The authors thank the anonymous referees of the journal for their comments. Moreover, the authors gratefully acknowledge the funding from the NOS-HS Workshop call 2020 under the Research Council (Academy) of Finland grant 335095 and the NordForsk grant 126546. In addition, the work in Finland (TJ) has been financially supported by the Research Council of Finland under project 339268. In Sweden (JM), the work has been supported by the Swedish national research infrastructure Språkbanken and Swe-Clarin, funded jointly by the Swedish Research Council (2018–24, contract 2017-00626) and the ten participating partner institutions. The work in Norway (LF) has been financially supported by the Norwegian Research Council under project 287067.

Appendix: Full list of reviewed publications

  1. 1. Arnold, Brittany & Lindsay Ferrara. 2024. ‘Your turn!’ Using finger pointing and PALM-UP actions to ask questions in Norwegian Sign Language. Sign Language Studies 24(3). 621–651.

  2. 2. Börstell, Carl. 2019. Differential object marking in sign languages. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 4(1). 3.

  3. 3. Börstell, Carl. 2022. Searching and utilizing corpora. In Jordan Fenlon & Julie A. Hochgesang (eds.), Signed language corpora, 90–127. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press.

  4. 4. Börstell, Carl. 2024. Evaluating the alignment of utterances in the Swedish Sign Language Corpus. In Eleni Efthimiou et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the LREC-COLING 2024 11th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Evaluation of sign language resources, 22–31. European Language Resources Association & International Committee on Computational Linguistics. https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/24003.html

  5. 5. Börstell, Carl. 2024. How to approach lexical variation in sign language corpora. In Eleni Efthimiou et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the LREC-COLING 2024 11th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Evaluation of sign language resources, 222–229. European Language Resources Association & International Committee on Computational Linguistics. https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/24026.html

  6. 6. Börstell, Carl & Robert Östling. 2016. Visualizing lects in a sign language corpus: Mining lexical variation data in lects of Swedish Sign Language. In Eleni Efthimiou et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the LREC 2016 7th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Corpus mining, 13–18. European Language Resources Association. https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/16004.html

  7. 7. Börstell, Carl, Thomas Hörberg & Robert Östling. 2016. Distribution and duration of signs and parts of speech in Swedish Sign Language. Sign Language & Linguistics 19(2). 143–196.

  8. 8. Börstell, Carl, Tommi Jantunen, Vadim Kimmelman, Vanja de Lint, Johanna Mesch & Marloes Oomen. 2019. Transitivity prominence within and across modalities. Open Linguistics 5(1). 666–689.

  9. 9. Börstell, Carl, Johanna Mesch & Lars Wallin. 2014. Segmenting the Swedish Sign Language Corpus: On the possibilities of using visual cues as a basis for syntactic segmentation. In Onno Crasborn et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the LREC 2014 6th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Beyond the manual channel, 7–10. European Language Resources Association. https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/14023.html

  10. 10. Börstell, Carl, Mats Wirén, Johanna Mesch & Moa Gärdenfors. 2016. Towards an annotation of syntactic structure in the Swedish Sign Language Corpus. In Eleni Efthimiou et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the LREC 2016 7th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Corpus mining, 19–24. European Language Resources Association. https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/16025.html

  11. 11. Crasborn, Onno, Johanna Mesch, Dafydd Waters, Els van der Kooij, Bencie Woll & Brita Bergman. 2007. Sharing sign language data online: Experiences from the ECHO project. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 12(4). 535–562.

  12. 12. Crasborn, Onno, Els van der Kooij, Dafydd Waters, Bencie Woll & Johanna Mesch. 2008. Frequency distribution and spreading behavior of different types of mouth actions in three sign languages. Sign Language and Linguistics 11(1). 45–67.

  13. 13. Ferrara, Lindsay. 2020. Some interactional functions of finger pointing in signed language conversations. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 5(1). 1–26.

  14. 14. Ferrara, Lindsay. 2022. Indexing turn-beginnings in Norwegian Sign Language conversation. Gesture 21(1). 1–27.

  15. 15. Ferrara, Lindsay & Torill Ringsø. 2019. Spatial vantage points in Norwegian Sign Language. Open Linguistics 5. 583–600.

  16. 16. Ferrara, Lindsay, Benjamin Anible, & Lena Mei Kalvenes Anda. 2023. Exploring sign-writing contact and multilingualism in the Norwegian Deaf community. In Ella Wehrmeyer (ed.), Advances in sign language corpus linguistics, 66–89. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

  17. 17. Ferrara, Lindsay, Benjamin Anible, Gabrielle Hodge, Tommi Jantunen, Johanna Mesch, Lorraine Leeson & Anna-Lena Nilsson. 2023. A cross-linguistic comparison of reference across five signed languages. Linguistic Typology 27(3). 591–627.

  18. 18. Gavrilescu, Robert, Carlo Geraci & Johanna Mesch. 2024. Content questions in sign language: From theory to language description via corpus, experiments, and fieldwork. In Eleni Efthimiou et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the LREC-COLING 2024 11th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Evaluation of sign language resources, 298–306. European Language Resources Association & International Committee on Computational Linguistics. https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/24037.html

  19. 19. Jantunen, Tommi. 2017. Constructed action, the clause and the nature of syntax in Finnish Sign Language. Open Linguistics 3(1). 65–85.

  20. 20. Jantunen, Tommi. 2017. Fixed and NOT free: Revisiting the order of the main clausal constituents in Finnish Sign Language from a corpus perspective. SKY Journal of Linguistics 30. 137–149.

  21. 21. Jantunen, Tommi, Johanna Mesch, Anna Puupponen & Jorma Laaksonen. 2016. On the rhythm of head movements in Finnish and Swedish Sign Language sentences. In Jon Barnes et al. (eds.), Speech Prosody 2016: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Speech Prosody, 850–853. International Speech Communication Association. https://doi.org/10.21437/SpeechProsody.2016-174

  22. 22. Jantunen, Tommi, Outi Pippuri, Tuija Wainio, Anna Puupponen & Jorma Laaksonen. 2016. Annotated video corpus of FinSL with Kinect and computer-vision data. In Eleni Efthimiou et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the LREC 2016 7th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Corpus mining, 93–100. European Language Resources Association. https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/16006.html

  23. 23. Kankkonen, Nikolaus Riemer, Thomas Björkstrand, Johanna Mesch & Carl Börstell. 2018. Crowdsourcing for the Swedish Sign Language Dictionary. In Mayumi Bono et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the LREC 2018 8th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Involving the language community, 171–174. European Language Resources Association. https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/18022.html

  24. 24. Keränen, Jarkko, Henna Syrjälä, Juhana Salonen & Ritva Takkinen. 2016. The usability of the annotation. In Eleni Efthimiou et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the LREC 2016 7th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Corpus mining, 111–116. European Language Resources Association. https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/16016.html

  25. 25. Leeson, Lorraine, Jordan Fenlon, Johanna Mesch, Carmel Grehan & Sarah Sheridan. 2019. The uses of corpora in L1 and L2/Ln sign language pedagogy. In Rosen S. Russell (ed.), The Routledge handbook of sign language pedagogy, 339–352. New York: Routledge.

  26. 26. Mesch, Johanna. 2010. Viittomien glossit ja ajalliset pituudet: Annotointityöskentelyyn liittyviä kysymyksiä [The glosses and temporal durations of signs: Questions relating to sign language annotation]. In Tommi Jantunen (ed.), Näkökulmia viittomaan ja viittomistoon [Theory and practice in applied linguistics], 43–55. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä.

  27. 27. Mesch, Johanna. 2012. Swedish Sign Language Corpus. Deaf Studies Digital Journal 3. http://dsdj.gallaudet.edu/index.php?issue=4&section_id=2&entry_id=128

  28. 28. Mesch, Johanna. 2015. Svensk teckenspråkskorpus: Dess tillkomst och uppbyggnad (Forskning om teckenspråk XXIV) [Swedish Sign Language Corpus: Its creation and structure (Research on sign language XXIV)], 1–25. Stockholm: Section for Sign Language, Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University. https://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-123713

  29. 29. Mesch, Johanna. 2016. Manual backchannel responses in signers’ conversations in Swedish Sign Language. Language & Communication 50. 22–41.

  30. 30. Mesch, Johanna. 2023. Creating a multifaceted corpus of Swedish Sign Language: Visual, tactile, and L2 signing. In Ella Wehrmeyer (ed.), Advances in sign language corpus linguistics, 242–261. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

  31. 31. Mesch, Johanna & Lars Wallin. 2008. Use of sign language materials in teaching. In Onno Crasborn et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the LREC 2008 3rd Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Construction and exploitation of sign language corpora, 134–137. European Language Resources Association. https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/08025.html

  32. 32. Mesch, Johanna & Lars Wallin. 2012. From meaning to signs and back: Lexicography and the Swedish Sign Language Corpus. In Onno Crasborn et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the LREC 2012 5th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Interactions between corpus and lexicon, 123–126. European Language Resources Association. https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/12002.html

  33. 33. Mesch, Johanna & Lars Wallin. 2015. Gloss annotations in the Swedish Sign Language Corpus. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 20(1). 102–120.

  34. 34. Mesch, Johanna, Thomas Björkstrand, Eira Balkstam, Patrick Hansson & Nikolaus Riemer Kankkonen. 2024. Swedish Sign Language resources from a user’s perspective. In Eleni Efthimiou et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the LREC-COLING 2024 11th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Evaluation of sign language resources, 54–61. European Language Resources Association & International Committee on Computational Linguistics. https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/24007.html

  35. 35. Mesch, Johanna, Elisabet Cortes, Thomas Björkstrand, Nikolaus Riemer Kankkonen, Joel Bäckström & Patrick Hansson. 2023. Teckenspråkslexikografi: Utmaningar i en annan modalitet [Sign language lexicography: Challenges in a different modality]. In Louise Holmer et al. (eds.), Nordiska studier i lexikografi 16: Rapport från 16:e konferensen om lexikografi i Norden, 225–240. Lund/Göteborg: Nordiska föreningen för lexikografi i samarbete med Meijerbergs institut för svensk etymologisk forskning.

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Footnotes

1 The exact number of signed language corpora in the world is unknown, partly because the criteria for corpushood (see Section 2) are treated flexibly. The most well-known and referenced corpora exist in Europe and Australia (Western countries). However, types of corpora exist also, for example, in Brazil, South Africa, Hong Kong, and Japan (see Wehrmeyer Reference Wehrmeyer2023).

2 Currently, Denmark and Iceland do not have signed language corpora or related publications, although work for a signed language corpus was planned to begin in Denmark a few years ago (see Troelsgård & Kristoffersen Reference Troelsgård and Kristoffersen2018). There has also been a desire to build a corpus in Iceland. The absence of corpora in these countries is the reason why their signed languages, Danish Sign Language and Icelandic Sign Language (and Faroese and Greenlandic Signed Language; see Mesch Reference Mesch2022), are not covered in this review.

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Figure 0

Table 1. The four large signed language corpora in the Nordic countries

Figure 1

Table 2. Corpus publications and their main function per four Nordic signed languages

Figure 2

Table 3. The primary goal of non-method papers

Figure 3

Table 4. The main topics of papers that describe single linguistic features or varieties. Bold text indicates common research themes

Figure 4

Figure 1. Timeline of corpus publications per four Nordic signed languages. The bigger the circle the more publications that year. The smallest circle corresponds to one publication, the largest to three.