Indicating verbs in British Sign Language

The aim of this project is to exploit an existing large video dataset of British Sign Language (or ‘BSL’, the language of the British deaf community), collected under the BSL Corpus Project (BSLCP, 2008-2011), and to conduct corpus-based investigations into a unique aspect of its grammar. The primary aim of the project is to use the data collected to investigate variation and change in the use of directional verbs in BSL.

In the BSL Corpus Project, data were collected from 249 native and near-native deaf signers of BSL from 8 sites across the United Kingdom. The data are representative of the language community, including a mix of men and women, deaf adults with deaf parents and those with hearing parents, signers who are young and old, and individuals from working and middle class backgrounds as well as different ethnic groups.

This project is being led by researchers at the Deafness Cognition and Language Research Centre in collaboration with Dr. Adam Schembri (La Trobe University).

More information

Directional verbs in BSL project website.