Corpus annotation for studying grammatical expression of events: notes about the design of RADIS project

Abstract

The RADIS project aims to approach the grammatical description of Spanish Sign Language (LSE) from contextualized uses. In particular, its main objective is to compile and analyse the LSE predications from a typological-comparative perspective. The process of annotating in ELAN is hereby briefly described. It consists of three phases or levels: primary annotation, annotation of non-manual components, and secondary or grammatical annotation.

This method –in particular the grammatical annotation– allows us to analyse the main resources for expressing event participants in LSE. Verb arguments are categorised into external (pronouns or nominal phrases), internal (descriptive constructions with classifiers and locus) and those non-based on a specific manual articulation, as it is the case for constructed action, expressed by non-manual components, as well as other examples of referent maintenance throughout the discourse without any explicit mention.

The use of quantitative methods enables the correlation of forms of expression with different types of discourse.