Conference article

Iconic Locations in Swedish Sign Language: Mapping Form to Meaning with Lexical Databases

Carl Börstell
Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University, Sweden

Robert Östling
Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University, Sweden

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Published in: Proceedings of the 21st Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics, NoDaLiDa, 22-24 May 2017, Gothenburg, Sweden

Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 131:26, p. 221-225

NEALT Proceedings Series 29:26, p. 221-225

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Published: 2017-05-08

ISBN: 978-91-7685-601-7

ISSN: 1650-3686 (print), 1650-3740 (online)

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a method for mapping the phonological feature location of Swedish Sign Language (SSL) signs to the meanings in the Swedish semantic dictionary SALDO. By doing so, we observe clear differences in the distribution of meanings associated with different locations on the body. The prominence of certain locations for specific meanings clearly point to iconic mappings between form and meaning in the lexicon of SSL, which pinpoints modalityspecific properties of the visual modality.

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