The Open Repository of the Polish Sign Language Corpus is one of the outcomes of the project “Multi-layered linguistic annotation of the Polish Sign Language (PJM) Corpus,” under module 1.2 of the 3rd edition of the National Programme for the Development of the Humanities (NPRH) of the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education (0111/NPRH3/H12/82/2014).

 

The PJM Corps is a project underway since 2010 to collect language data from native signers of Polish Sign Language (PJM). The corpus material currently amassed contains recordings of signing by 150 Deaf people from all over the country.

 

All data in the corpus was created specifically for this project and was obtained during recording sessions organized mostly at the facilities of the Section for Sign Linguistics, University of Warsaw. Deaf signers of PJM, born and living in Poland, were invited to participate. To ensure that the corpus would be as representative of the language as possible, the recordings involve a balanced number of men and women, representing different age groups, with varying levels of education and places of birth. Each recording session included a pair of informants. This helped us to obtain natural dialogs, and thus also to capture a variety of syntax structures. In addition to the two informants, a Deaf session moderator was also present in the recording studio, who watched over the course of the session and explained any issues that required clarification. The only contact language used was PJM.

 

Each of the tasks was carried out by the informants as a pair, reporting to one another on the materials they had viewed, discussing selected topics, making joint arrangements, etc. The elicitation materials used were drawings, movie clips, picture boards, and maps. The informants did not know their tasks beforehand.

 

The collected data was then annotated in iLex – it was divided into individual characters, lemmatized, tagged, transcribed in the HamNoSys notation and the individual sentences were translated into Polish.

 

The resulting corpus supports reliable linguistic research on Polish Sign Language (PJM) based on a large body of language material. It is also of extraordinary value as a repository of Deaf culture and as an archive of PJM, especially as used by the older generation of the Deaf. Given the lack of widely used PJM notation, a database of video material is the only way to take a snapshot of the current form of Polish Sign Language (PJM) and to preserve it for generations to come – both for members of the Deaf community and for sign language researchers.

 

The corpus project is also important in helping to counteract the deprecation of sign language and support the emancipation of the Deaf themselves, who through such projects should be confirmed in the sense of the value of their own language.

 

More information about the PJM Corpus can be found in the following publications:

 

Paweł Rutkowski, Sylwia Łozińska, Joanna Filipczak, Joanna Łacheta, Piotr Mostowski (2013), Jak powstaje korpus polskiego języka migowego (PJM)?, Polonica 33, 297-308. 

 

Paweł Rutkowski, Sylwia Łozińska, eds. (2014), Lingwistyka przestrzeni i ruchu. Komunikacja migowa a metody korpusowe, Warsaw: Faculty of Polish Studies, University of Warsaw, ISBN: 978-83-64111-12-9 (print), 978-83-64111-85-3 (PDF).

Paweł Rutkowski, Anna Kuder, Joanna Filipczak, Piotr Mostowski, Joanna Łacheta, Sylwia Łozińska (2017), The design and compilation of the Polish Sign Language (PJM) Corpus, in: Different faces of sign language research (Lingwistyka Migowa w Polsce / Sign Linguistics in Poland: 2), ed. Paweł Rutkowski, Warsaw: Faculty of Polish Studies, University of Warsaw, 125-151.