The Architecture of Functional Categories in American Sign Language

美国手语功能范畴的架构

• 批准号: 9410562
• 负责人: Carol Neidle
• 金额: $ 35.5万
• 依托单位: Trustees of Boston University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 1994
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1994-11-01 至 1998-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9410562&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Architecture; Functional; Categories; American; Sign

Neidle Although some research on American Sign Language (ASL) syntax has been done, the field still lacks consensus on even the most basic questions regarding ASL phrase structure. Many theoretical controversies may, in fact, be a consequence of inadequate means for written transcription and reporting of visual-gestural data. This has precluded both the replicability of results and accessibility of the raw data for direct inspection by the scientific community. The representation of ASL signs using English-like glosses has obliterated-and implicitly undervalued-extremely important manual and non-manual information expressed through signing. Glosses are inconsistent and frequently ambiguous or misleading. Reliance on glosses may well have given rise to incompatible and contradictory theoretical claims found in the literature. We will develop a prototype of a linguistically oriented computerized multimedia database of ASL that allows simultaneous access to raw video data and to representations of that data in linguistically useful formats. It is our hope that our prototype will lead to subsequent funding for the development of a large-scale sign database, accessible through a server, via the Internet, to the ASL research community. We come to this task with a very specific research agenda: to test and refine the hierarchical representation of functional categories in ASL that has emerged from our recent studies focusing on Agreement; grammatical relations; and Tense and Aspect. We have achieved sufficient understanding of the syntactic organization of ASL to lay out the major components of its phrase structure, and to identify what is needed to complete the picture. To answer those outstanding questions, we will investigate several constructions in detail: the tag construction, rhetorical questions, and relative clauses. We intend to use standard methods of linguistic elicitation and argumentation, supported by multimedia documentation of our da ta. While the two parts of the project are different in nature, we believe that significant progress in the understanding of ASL syntax can only be achieved by syntactic analyses based on the kind of rigorous attention to data that current technologies now make possible.

内德勒 虽然已经对美国手语（ASL）句法进行了一些研究，但该领域仍然缺乏关于ASL短语结构的最基本问题的共识。 事实上，许多理论上的争议可能是书面转录和报告视觉手势数据的手段不足的结果。 这使得科学界既无法复制结果，也无法获得原始数据以供直接检查。 美国手语符号的代表性使用英语一样的注释已经抹杀了-和隐含低估-非常重要的手动和非手动信息通过签署表示。 注释是不一致的，经常是模棱两可或误导。对注释的依赖很可能导致文献中发现的不相容和矛盾的理论主张。 我们将开发一个原型的语言为导向的计算机化多媒体数据库的ASL，允许同时访问原始视频数据和语言有用的格式表示该数据。我们希望，我们的原型将导致随后的资金，用于开发一个大规模的标志数据库，可通过服务器，通过互联网，美国手语研究界。 我们来到这个任务与一个非常具体的研究议程：测试和完善的层次表示的功能类别在美国手语，已经出现了我们最近的研究集中在协议;语法关系;和时态和方面。 我们对美国手语的句法组织已经有了足够的了解，从而可以列出其短语结构的主要组成部分，并确定完成这幅图所需要的内容。 为了回答这些突出的问题，我们将详细研究几种结构：标记结构，反问句和关系从句。 我们打算使用标准的语言启发和论证的方法，我们的数据的多媒体文档的支持。 虽然该项目的两个部分在性质上是不同的，但我们认为，只有通过基于对数据的严格关注的语法分析，才能在理解ASL语法方面取得重大进展，而目前的技术使这种分析成为可能。