Lexical Properties of Slovene Sign Language: A Corpus-Based Study

Slovene Sign Language (SZJ) has as yet received little attention from linguists. This article presents some basic facts about SZJ, its history, current status, and a description of the Slovene Sign Language Corpus and Pilot Grammar (SIGNOR) project, which compiled and annotated a representative corpus of SZJ. Finally, selected quantitative data extracted from the corpus are presented. The article discusses certain lexical and semantic properties of SZJ, for example, the role of fillers and gestures. Figures are compared to related works, particularly corpus-based studies of British Sign Language (BSL) and Auslan. The article concludes by outlining plans for future research and ways in which the present corpus could improve basic reference works for SZJ and serve as a basis for new technologies.