CORPUS OF SIGNS IN WRITING AS A TOOL TO INVESTIGATE THE PECULIARITIES OF HOW SIGNS FORM UP
(ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE RUSSIAN SIGN LANGUAGE)
Abstract
We investigate the peculiarities of how gestures are formed in Sign Languages; deaf people use these gestures to communicate with each other. These peculiarities make it problematic to describe the Sign Languages linguistically. The Sign Language allows hear-impaired people to communicate non-verbally. It occupies a special place among all languages. The Sign Language is an independent full-fledged language with its own construction rules. In Sign Languages, almost every word conforms to a sign. Until recently, Sign Languages had no written form. The developed systems of gesture recording (notation) allow us to fix all their elements in the form of a sequence of signs. This makes it possible to transmit and store important information to use in various human activities. We describe the specifics of how sign (gesture) are formed in Russian Sign Language. We give examples of how gestures are recorded by means of the signs of the SignWriting system. At the moment, this system is the most common in many countries. One advantage of this notation is that the system describes gestures highly accurately. The second advantage is that the system is universally applicable to many national Sign Languages. This allows us to investigate the structure of gestures in a convenient static form, to reveal how the sign peculiarities form up. Our investigation is based on the elements of our own corpus (dictionary) of the most common gestures; the gestures are written in the SignWriting notation and grouped according to subject. The results we obtained can be useful for the researchers who specialize in Sign Languages and develop software to recognize Sign Languages. We analyzed the peculiarities of the Russian Sign Language by means of the SignWriting signs. We demonstrated how effective the written representation of gestures is to study Sign Languages.
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