The Beginnings of Phonetic and Phonological Coding in the Signs of Ireland Digital Corpus: the Representation of Handshapes

This paper discusses some of the research that has been done on phonetics and phonology in signed languages. We will discuss aspects of a few phonological models in relation to two of the parameters that have been proposed for signed languages, hand configuration and local movement. We will also discuss a range of issues with respect to expanding the annotation of the Signs of Ireland (SOI) corpus to incorporate phonetic and phonological coding. This forms part of ongoing PHD research work that explores the phonology-morphology interface in Irish Sign Language (ISL)