The DGS corpus as a linguistic resource: student research and beyond

This paper has two objectives: we provide a detailed description of the DGS corpus, the largest existing collection of German Sign Language (DGS) data, and we show how such a corpus may be and already has been used as a resource for linguistic research in academic settings. In the first part, we describe where and how the Public DGS Corpus can be accessed, the types of elicitation tasks and formats that were used for data collection, and the regional and sociolinguistic background of the participants. Taking into account which phonetic, morpho-syntactic, and lexical information has been annotated thus far, we then make suggestions for a wide range of applications of the corpus in phonetic, morphological, syntactic, information structural, sociolinguistic, and typological studies of DGS. Lastly, we summarize the methodologies and results of selected research projects that are based on the DGS corpus.