Status: Ongoing as Advisor
Although some research on 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. Thus, in conjunction with our syntactic research, we are currently developing 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.
To make data available over the web, we are completing an online database access interface, which includes robust query machinery to allow linguists and computer scientists to quickly find video and linguistic data by browsing an intuitive hierarchy of our data complete with an easy to learn query language (Pair-Based Query Langauge, PBL) to find linguistic utterances contained in our database.
ASLLRP Project Web Page