Signed Language Linguistics: Taking Stock (workshop)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Signed Language Linguistics: Taking Stock Signed language linguistics is a relatively young field, which started in 1960 with the first modern study of a signed language (Stokoe 1960). Since signed languages were often considered as primitive gesture systems, early research focused on demonstrating that they were indeed full, complex, independent languages. This research emphasised the equivalences between signed and spoken languages. In later years, researchers turned more towards issues of modality, investigating the modality-specific properties of signed languages, such as the use of space and simultaneous constructions. More recently still, we observe an increasing interest in comparing different (related and unrelated) signed languages, comparing typological properties of spoken and signed languages, as well as comparing aspects of signed languages to aspects of co-speech gesture. At the same time, new technologies and tools facilitate, for example, the construction of large-scale signed language corpora, which offer opportunities to address new research questions. Naturally, new theoretical developments and advances within the field of spoken language linguistics have been applied to signed language studies as well. Fifty-eight years after the first modern signed language linguistic publication, this workshop invites us to take stock of what we have done and look forward to where we are going. We propose a workshop in three parts: 1. Part one presents an overview of the history of signed language linguistics as a field, showing the distance travelled in such a short period of time. 2. Part two aims to offer a selection of presentations illustrating the current state of the art, focusing e.g. on multimodality, the gesture-sign interface, composite meaning construction, “embodiment” and/or presenting work from a range of more recent approaches and theoretical frameworks such as cognitive and corpus linguistic approaches, construction grammar, pictorial semantics, etc. 3. In part three of the workshop a selection of notions and terminology used in current signed language studies will be discussed in detail. The aim is to compare the different understandings of these notions and terms within the field as well as compare their use to potentially comparable concepts addressed in spoken language studies as well as gesture studies. For example: Do we all mean the same thing when we talk about “constructed action” and “constructed dialogue”? Is this the same for spoken and sign language research? For gesture studies? Target audience: This workshop targets signed language as well as spoken language linguists, including those who are not (yet) familiar with signed language linguistics, but who would like to learn about where signed language linguistics comes from and where it is now. Today, it is clear that all questions relevant to the study of spoken languages are also relevant for signed languages, and that research questions addressed by signed language researchers may – and maybe should – also be asked for spoken languages. Organisers: coordinator: Myriam Vermeerbergen (KU Leuven & Stellenbosch University), in collaboration with: Lindsay Ferrara & Anna-Lena Nilsson (Norwegian University of Science and Technology), Terry Janzen (University of Manitoba), Lorraine Leeson (Trinity College Dublin), Barbara Shaffer (University of New Mexico).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.126 | 0.077 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".