The focus of this collaboration is a corpus-based analysis of mouthings in German Sign Language (DGS), bringing together the perspectives of various researchers with a keen interest in the topic of mouthings. The analysis will be based on the annotated data from the “MEINE DGS – annotiert” of the Hamburg DGS Corpus. The DGS Corpus already contains extensive mouthing annotations; however, these are tied to the main glosses. This means that mouthings without manual glosses or mouthings produced by the addressee as feedback are not annotated in the corpus. Moreover, there is no information on the form or function of mouthings. In this collaboration, we aim to achieve the following objectives:

• A representative study on the use of mouthings in DGS based on DGS data from the online corpus (e.g., How frequently do mouthings occur in DGS?),
• Consideration of socio-cultural (region, age, gender, educational background) and communication-specific variation (language register, discourse context) (e.g., How often is the DGS sign HOUSE produced with a mouthing during its initial introduction compared to later in the discourse?),
• Modeling of mouthings (e.g., What is the probability that a specific mouthing co-occurs with a particular sign (nouns versus verbs, lexical versus productive signs)? What is the relationship between mouthing and word class in DGS? What is the tension between mouthing and mouth gesture in DGS?).

We aim to combine two approaches:

1. targeted search and analysis of individual DGS gestures: a list of about 20 noun-verb pairs will be generated and analysed for their co-occurrence with mouthing in the whole corpus,
2. in addition, we will annotate and analyse several hours (about 10 hours) of spontaneous DGS conversations in the entire MEINE DGS part and analyse them with regard to the use of mouthing without manual glossing and as feedback.

Collaborations with Roman Poryadin (independent researcher), Nina-Kristin Meister (University of Göttingen) Patrick C. Trettenbrein (MPI for Human Cognitive & Brain Sciences Leipzig) and Liona Paulus (University of Hamburg)

Mohr, Susanne, Bauer, Anastasia & Liona Paulus. (submitted). Cultural aspects of sign languages. In the Elsevier International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. (3rd edition), Section “Anthropological Linguistics/Linguistic Anthropology”, ed. by Nico Nassenstein & Svenja Völkel.