Chapter 10. Overview of and epistemological conditions for building and using LSF corpora

Abstract

This chapter discusses French Sign Language (LSF) corpora and how they have evolved over the last thirty years in France. We first outline the epistemological and social conditions in which corpora were constructed by the pioneers of the field to explain how, in our opinion, their corpus-driven approach was decisive and very specific to France. Second, we focus on the theoretical framework we use, namely the Semiological Approach, and on the corpus-driven linguistics underlying this approach. On these bases, we present various LSF corpora that exist today, with particular focus on the two main corpora designed by our team, namely LS-Colin and Creagest, with special attention to data collected from deaf children. We then highlight how our own relationship with corpus data remains fundamental and heuristic.