A Colloquial Corpus of Japanese Sign Language: Linguistic Resources for Observing Sign Language Conversations

We began building a corpus of Japanese Sign Language (JSL) in April 2011. The purpose of this project was to increase awareness of sign language as a distinctive language in Japan. This corpus is beneficial not only to linguistic research but also to hearing-impaired and deaf individuals, as it helps them to recognize and respect their linguistic differences and communication styles. This is the first large-scale JSL corpus developed for both academic and public use. We collected data in three ways: interviews (for introductory purposes only), dialogues, and lexical elicitation. In this paper, we focus particularly on data collected during a dialogue to discuss the application of conversation analysis (CA) to signed dialogues and signed conversations. Our annotation scheme was designed not only to elucidate theoretical issues related to grammar and linguistics but also to clarify pragmatic and interactional phenomena related to the use of JSL.