Categorizing Role Shifting in ASL: Improving annotation of the NCSLGR Corpus

Camille M. Nunes
Dr. Darrin Hetrick, Faculty Mentor

This research presentation focuses on the terminology used to annotate role shifting in ASL, a grammatical device in which signers portray other individuals’ perspectives within a narrative, especially through the use of non-manual markers (facial expressions, body movements, and eye-gaze). I analyzed data from the National Center for Sign Language and Gesture Resource Corpus (NCSLGR) and concluded that the annotation conventions used in their data would benefit from reorganization. The data comes from video footage annotated in ELAN, a video and audio annotation program. The current labeling system does not reflect the research consensus on the terminology used in classifying role shifting and leads to ambiguities in annotating the level of iconicity (how closely the sign resembles its meaning).

Keywords: American Sign Language, Role shifting, Constructed action, Constructed dialogue

Topic(s):Linguistics

Presentation Type: Oral Presentation

Session: TBA
Location: TBA
Time: TBA