Introduction
Welcome to the preliminary version of the NGT grammar. In this section, we introduce the SIGN-HUB project and its goals, and describe how one sub-project resulted in the current descriptive grammar of NGT. Importantly, this preliminary digital version of the descriptive grammar is not the only version of the grammar. The author of the grammar is a PhD candidate, supported by the SIGN-HUB project, and the descriptive grammar in book version will be her doctoral dissertation. She is currently in the process of writing and finalizing the book version of the grammar, which will be copied onto the platform once it is finished – around March 2021. Thus, the texts in this digital grammar are not yet finalized and, unfortunately, still have examples missing – sometimes indicated by yellow highlights in the text. We thank you for your patience, and are happy to answer any questions about the grammar or the procedure in the meanwhile (see contact details below).
The SIGN-HUB project
As the SIGN-HUB website states: “SIGN-HUB is a 4-year research project (2016-2020) funded by the European Commission within Horizon 2020 Reflective Society 2015, Research and Innovation actions. It has been designed by a European research team to provide an innovative and inclusive resource hub for the linguistic, historical and cultural documentation of the Deaf communities’ heritage and for sign language assessment in clinical intervention and school settings.” (https://www.unive.it/pag/33750/). The project consists of four subprojects, which are devoted to:
- the description of the grammar of six (which became seven) European sign languages;
- the development of a digital ‘atlas’ of linguistic structures of sign languages;
- the development of tools to test sign language skills;
- the documentation of live stories of elderly Deaf.
The current NGT grammar is part of project 1. Before we describe this subproject in more depth below, attention must be paid to the project that preceded the SIGN-HUB project, namely, the SignGram COST Action (Action IS1006, “Unraveling the grammars of European sign languages: pathways to full citizenship of deaf signers and to the protection of their linguistic heritage”, http://signgram.eu). In the COST Action, the SignGram Blueprint was developed, which is a manual for writing a sign language grammar. The manual offers an internal structure for the descriptive grammar, and furthermore provides definitions, examples, elicitation materials and references. The structure aims to include every possible grammatical element that can be observed in a sign language. This turned out to be very well-suited for NGT, and the SignGram Blueprint has proven an invaluable tool in the process of writing this grammar. Please note that the SignGram Blueprint is published Open Access, which means it is freely available to everyone. The Blueprint can be downloaded here: https://www.degruyter.com/viewbooktoc/product/467598
Grammars of seven European sign languages
We would like to go in some more detail into the first subproject, in which seven (originally six) grammars have been described. The following sign languages were originally included in this subproject: German Sign Language, Spanish Sign Language, Catalan Sign Language, Italian Sign Language, Turkish Sign Language, and Sign Language of the Netherlands. During the project, some descriptions of French Sign Language have become available as well, hence the addition of a seventh grammar. All grammar writers used the SignGram Blueprint and adopted the proposed outline, so that the descriptive grammars all have the same structure. All grammars have at least an English version, and some teams had the means to additionally make available a version in the local written language and/or sign language. For NGT, this is unfortunately not the case – although the aim is to provide Dutch summaries later, and to find funds to have these translated into NGT, as the platform allows for the addition of content in the future. This means that it is also possible to further supplement the grammars content-wise, and to add new research results, so that they become more and more complete.
The platform version and the book version
Besides the possibility to add content later, other advantages of a digital grammar are the option of including videos and the possibility for users to easily switch between grammars or between a grammar and the glossary. Still, the grammar of NGT is also provided in a physical book form, due to requirements of the University of Amsterdam for researchers to receive a doctoral degree. Content-wise, the book and the digital grammar are exactly the same at this point. We decided to maintain the exact same structure in the book as in the digital grammar, so that the link between the two is clear, and so that video-examples which are referred to in the book can be found more easily in the digital version. Remember that the outline of the grammar aims to include every possible grammatical element. This sometimes resulted in empty sections in the grammar, either because a particular phenomenon is not relevant for the sign language at stake, or because it has not been investigated for that language yet.
Final remarks
In the final version, this introduction will be extended with information on the methodological issues that we dealt with, as well as additional details regarding differences between the digital and the book version and the procedure of writing. There are two things we would like to note here already. First, writing this descriptive grammar would not have been possible without the Corpus NGT, an extensive source of data, in which 92 deaf signers participated (Crasborn, Zwitserlood & Ros 2008, see full reference below). Many of our descriptions are based on this dataset, and we would like to acknowledge the Corpus NGT team here, who compiled the corpus and has been making annotations ever since. Secondly, note that every chapter ends with information about the author, Ulrika Klomp, but that this digital grammar has two editors at the moment: Roland Pfau & Ulrika Klomp. After completion of Ulrika Klomp’s PhD project (fall 2020), Roland Pfau will remain the editor of this digital grammar, and will be responsible for adding new content to this platform.
Ulrika Klomp & Roland Pfau
uva.nl/en/profile/k/l/u.klomp/u.klomp.html
uva.nl/en/profile/p/f/r.pfau/r.pfau.html
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Corpus NGT: Crasborn, Onno, Inge Zwitserlood & Johan Ros. 2008. Het Corpus NGT. Een digitaal open accesscorpus van filmpjes en annotaties van de Nederlandse Gebarentaal [The Corpus NGT. A digital open access corpus of videos and annotations of NGT]. Centre for Language Studies, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen. URL: https://www.ru.nl/corpusngtuk/introduction/welcome/
This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant Agreement No 693349.