De l’entorse à la norme à l’atypicité typique : Retour sur un corpus de SMS de sourds et ses métadonnées

• Main Author: Michel Otell
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cercle linguistique du Centre et de l'Ouest - CerLICO 2019-04-01
• Series: Corela
• Subjects: corpus collecting; deaf; qualitative analysis; context; bilingualism
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/corela/7831

This article looks back over a corpus of conversational text messages between deaf subjects with (written) French and French Sign Language (FSL) bilingualism. This retrospective overview of this corpus covers in particular its shaping and boundaries, the preliminary fieldwork, the data collection protocol, and the challenges of annotation work. This is an attempt to discuss the benefits and limitations of both quantitative-oriented and qualitative-oriented positioning decisions that need to be made prior to collecting the data. Deaf bilingualism is deeply wrought by issues of cultural, social, economic, historical, and political nature, as well as identity construction forces and epistemic standpoints. When seen as the locus from which the collected speech emerges, as well as a promising resource for addressing the analyst’s relationship to his subject, this complex context proves to be a powerful asset. By describing the distinctive linguistic features of this collection of written conversations between deaf subjects, this article aims to elucidate some pitfalls that can be anticipated, prevented, or avoided, with exploratory qualitative fieldwork and analysis protocols.