Project themes (Projektthemen)

The joint research of the SemaSign team involves several intertwining themes. We seek to contribute to the documentation of the three sign languages (DGS, KSL, LGG) by creating network maps of semantic associations that reflect collective usage of signs within a language community. Such usage reflects the ‘languaculture’ of each community—an ethnology theme. When compared across languages, associative networks can also reveal underlying lexical semantic similarities based on shared human experiences. This typology theme seeks to make comparisons across both signed and spoken languages. One line of investigation explores semantic categories that have shown to exhibit similarities and differences: colours, kinship, and fruits/vegetables. At the level of form and meaning representation in the lexicon, there is a linguistic structure theme that investigates phonology and morphology in the lexicons of the project languages. Here we post a selection of work by our project team.