Segmenting the Swedish Sign Language corpus : On the possibilities of using visual cues as a basis for syntactic segmentation

This paper deals with the possibility of conducting syntactic segmentation of the Swedish Sign Language Corpus (SSLC) on the basis of the visual cues from both manual and nonmanual signals. The SSLC currently features segmentation on the lexical level only, which is why the need for a linguistically valid segmentation on e.g. the clausal level would be very useful for corpus-based studies on the grammatical structure of Swedish Sign Language (SSL). An experiment was carried out letting seven Deaf signers of SSL each segment two short texts (one narrative and one dialogue) using ELAN, based on the visual cues they perceived as boundaries. This was later compared to the linguistic analysis done by a language expert (also a Deaf signer of SSL), who segmented the same texts into what was considered syntactic clausal units. Furthermore, these segmentation procedures were compared to the segmentation done for the Swedish translations also found in the SSLC. The results show that though the visual and syntactic segmentations overlap in many cases, especially when a number of cues coincide, the visual segmentation is not consistent enough to be used as a means of segmenting syntactic units in the SSLC.