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Review
. 2022 Jan 5:12:779479.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.779479. eCollection 2021.

Big Things Often Have Small Beginnings: A Review on the Development, Use and Value of Small and Big Corpora for Flemish Sign Language Linguistic Research

Beatrijs Wille  1 , Inez Beukeleers  2 , Mieke Van Herreweghe  1 , Myriam Vermeerbergen  2   3
Affiliations
Review

Big Things Often Have Small Beginnings: A Review on the Development, Use and Value of Small and Big Corpora for Flemish Sign Language Linguistic Research

Beatrijs Wille et al. Front Psychol. .

Abstract

In 1990, Vermeerbergen started the first larger-scale corpus study with (semi)spontaneous language data from adult signers on the morpho-syntactic aspects of Flemish Sign Language (VGT). After this, a number of lexicographic projects, including the collection of a 90-h corpus, led to the launch of the first online bilingual Dutch/VGT-VGT/Dutch dictionary in 2004. Since then, researchers have developed several corpora of variable sizes, with the greatest realization being the VGT Corpus. The main focus of this chapter is twofold. On the one hand the run-up to, the development and the use of the VGT Corpus will be discussed, while on the other hand smaller specific research corpora will be highlighted such as the corpus on early parent-child interaction and the multifocal eye-tracking corpus. The current chapter will discuss the research and community value of the corpora and future directions. Finally, it will elaborate on the need for corpus research, the associated advantages and disadvantages, and the obstacles faced in smaller deaf communities.

Keywords: Flemish Sign Language; automated sign language recognition; corpus linguistics; grammar; lexicography; multifocal eye-tracking; parent-child interactions; sociolinguistics.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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