Towards Accommodating Gerunds within the Sign Language Lexicon (2023)

Abstract: This work is part of ongoing research work that focuses on the linguistic analysis and computational description of five different Sign Languages (SLs), namely Irish Sign Language (ISL), Flemish Sign Language (VGT), Dutch Sign Language (NGT), Spanish Sign Language (LSE), and British Sign Language (BSL). This work will be leveraged to inform the development of SL lexicon entries for a Sign Language Machine Translation (SLMT) system. In particular, this research focuses on ISL. We investigate the existence of constructions similar to or equivalent in functionality to gerunds in spoken language, in particular, English. The initial findings indicate that such constructions do indeed exist and that they can take many forms.

## introduction sign languages are articulated using the visualgestural modality, unlike spoken languages, which use the auditory-vocal modality @xcite . sign languages make use of manual features (mfs) and @xcite . mfs involve the use of handshapes and their location and movement, and the palm orientation, whereas nmfs make use of the head, eye gaze, facial expressions, and body movement within gestural space @xcite . despite the significant technological advances in the computational processing of spoken languages, which is supported by extensive scientific research, signed languages have not received nearly as much attention. this issue has resulted in the exclusion of deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals and has further contributed to the marginalisation of a minority group that is already under-resourced due to limited access to language technologies and tools that can effectively facilitate communication @xcite . furthermore, there is a lack of research with regard to gerund constructions in sls. this research work will involve a comprehensive linguistic analysis of gerund constructions across five sign languages. this research work will provide insight into the role that gerunds play within sls with regard to the expression of ongoing events and actions as well as the formation of complex sentences. ## motivation this research is part of the signon project, which is a project concerned with bridging the communication gap between deaf, hard-of-hearing, and hearing individuals across europe. one of the larger aims of the signon project is to develop an application that will facilitate the translation between signed and spoken languages using different forms (text, video, and audio). as part of the project objectives, researchers will collaborate to guarantee equity in the dissemination of information and digital content across european societies 1 . this work will inform the development of sl lexicon entries within the signon project. these lexicon entries will be used within the natural language processing (nlp) pipeline, in the development of a slmt computational engine. this work is motivated by the lack of efficient slmt, which is still in its early stages @xcite . recent work within this domain includes the use of role and reference grammar (rrg) and the sign_a framework to provide sl lexicon entries for an slmt system. @xcite . this work focuses on the development of sl lexicon entries that are robust enough to accommodate sls (ibid.). section 3 will provide a summary of our methodology, data, and tools that are used to facilitate the analysis. ## methodology this initial phase of this research work deals with investigating the existence of gerunds within signed languages, in particular to this research, isl. ## gerunds as linguistic phenomena gerunds in spoken language, in particular spoken english, present themselves with the suffixation -ing at the end of a verb @xcite . example 1 provides an example of a gerund, where the verb destroying includes the suffixationing (ibid., p. 81). however, additional forms of verbs that use the same suffixation: present participle and past progressive are used with -ing. some verbal nouns and deverbal nouns use -ing as one of many forms for nominalisation purposes @xcite . this issue makes the distinction of gerund forms from other forms that use -ing suffixation challenging due to the similarity in representation (ibid.). @xcite refer to constructions in isl that are equivalent in functionality to gerunds in english. in example 3(a), the sign present is used to form the meaning presenting in english, whereas in example 3(b), the reduplication of the sign think is used to convey the meaning of thinking. example 3 (a) how you (c index f) feel first present "how did you feel about presenting?" (leeson and saeed, 2012, p. 105) (b) index+c cannot stop think++ "i cannot stop thinking [about it]" (leeson and saeed, 2012, p. 164) ## findings the following examples provide a mapping of isl translations to english language usage, however, before we can decipher how to define a gerund in terms of signed language and if these examples do indeed reflect instances of gerunds in isl, we must apply further analysis and investigation. ## conclusions and future work we have outlined here our preliminary research towards accommodating gerunds within the sign language lexicon. we have provided a mapping of isl translations to english language usage. the preliminary findings indicate that to correctly interpret if gerund constructions do indeed exist within signed languages, further analysis and investigation is necessary, in particular within the domain of aspect and aspectual marking in signed languages and spoken languages. there are many challenging obstacles with regard to the process of identification of these constructions within signed languages. even if verb reduplication conveys the meaning of an inflected verb with -ing (in english), the context determines whether the construction is a present participle construction or past progressive, due to the use of aspect or tense. with regard to sl, in some cases, reduplication refers to pluralisation and does not convey any other meaning (e.g. the repetition of the sign bee in example 5, in which it serves as plural (bees)). future work will focus on gathering more evidence with regard to gerunds within signed languages. further investigation will be carried out in terms of the morphological characteristics of gerund constructions within signed languages, alongside an analysis of their contextual usage.