The Architecture of Functional Categories in American Sign Language

虽然对美国手语（ASL）的语法进行了一些研究，但即使是关于ASL短语结构的最基本问题，该领域仍然缺乏共识。事实上，许多理论上的争议可能是视觉-手势数据的书面转录和报告手段不足的结果。这既排除了结果的可重复性，也排除了科学界直接检查原始数据的可及性。使用类似英语的注释来表示美国手语，已经抹杀了——并且隐含地低估了——通过手语表达的极其重要的手动和非手动信息。注释不一致，经常含糊不清或具有误导性。对注释的依赖很可能导致了文献中发现的不相容和相互矛盾的理论主张。我们将开发一个面向语言的电脑化多媒体美国手语数据库的原型，该数据库允许同时访问原始视频数据并以语言上有用的格式表示该数据。我们希望我们的原型能够为大型标识数据库的开发带来后续资金，通过服务器，通过互联网，向美国手语研究社区开放。我们带着一个非常具体的研究议程来完成这项任务：测试和完善美国手语中功能类别的分层表示，这是我们最近关注协议的研究中出现的；语法关系;时态和时态。我们已经对美国手语的句法组织有了足够的了解，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东西。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引出和论证方法，并辅以多媒体资料。虽然项目的两个部分在本质上是不同的，但我们相信，在理解ASL语法方面的重大进展只能通过基于当前技术所能实现的对数据的严格关注的语法分析来实现。

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.