The Nature of Verbs in Sign Languages: A Role and Reference Grammar Account of Irish Sign Language Verbs

This paper is concerned with the special nature of sign language verbs, in particular to this research, Irish Sign Language verbs. We use Role and Reference Grammar to provide a definition of the structure of lexical entries that are sufficiently rich and robust in nature to represent Irish Sign Language verbs. Role and Reference Grammar takes language to be a system of communicative social action, and accordingly, analysing the communicative functions of grammatical structures plays a vital role in grammatical description and theory from this perspective. This work is part of research on the development of a linguistically motivated computational framework for Irish Sign Language. In providing a definition of a linguistically motivated computational model for Irish Sign Language we must be able to refer to the various articulators (hands, fingers, eyes, eyebrows etc.), as these are what we use to articulate the various phonemes, morphemes and lexemes of an utterance. Irish Sign Language is a visual gestural language. The fact that Irish Sign Language has no written or oral form means that, for us to represent an Irish Sign Language utterance in computational terms we must implement the use of a humanoid avatar capable of movement within threedimensional space. Here, we provide an account of the grammatical information that can be found within Irish Sign Language verbs. We use the Signs of Ireland corpus to access the relevant linguistic data pertinent to Irish Sign Language. Further to this we use ELAN software as an application tool, which allows us to view the corpus and collate relevant linguistic phenomena pertinent to Irish Sign Language. We utilise the Event Visibility Hypothesis in the development of our proposed lexicon architecture