Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 2026 / KWIC view on Constructed Action (CA) and its Collocates in German Sign Language (DGS) – Possibilities and Limitations

KWIC view on Constructed Action (CA) and its Collocates in German Sign Language (DGS) – Possibilities and Limitations

Paper · 2026 · Sabrina Wähl

Summary

Most research on constructed action (CA), where a signer takes on a referent's role to show their actions, relies on story retellings driven by stimuli. This study instead examines spontaneous signing. It asks how much a keyword-in-context (KWIC) concordance view, a common tool in spoken-language lexicography, can reveal about which signs co-occur with CA in German Sign Language (DGS). The data are the Free conversation sessions of the Public DGS Corpus. In this corpus, CA is not glossed directly but is sometimes noted by annotators in a comment tier, so CA coverage is partial. An SQL query over the iLex database retrieved CA comments together with the glosses aligned with them and the glosses just before them. The frequency patterns fit earlier claims: CA tends to involve gestures and classifier constructions, and 'look' signs act as CA cues, as reported for ASL. However, the KWIC view cannot show who a sign refers to or where clause boundaries fall, so the author had to check tokens manually. The study concludes that concordance lines work well as one method among several but are insufficient alone.

Key points

  • Data: 34 Free conversation transcripts (68 participants) from the Public DGS Corpus, which is drawn from the roughly 560-hour DGS corpus. The query returned 486 CA annotations from 47 signers across 27 transcripts.
  • Search window: The window was first set to 5 preceding signs and then reduced to 3, because no patterns emerged at the wider range. Usable patterns appeared within 2 preceding signs.
  • Signs aligned with CA: $GEST (91), $PROD (71), I1/I2 (39), $INDEX (39) and TO-LOOK variants (34). Of the 39 I1/I2 tokens, 30 referred to the signer and 9 to third persons.
  • Signs immediately preceding CA: I1/I2 (75), $GEST (41), $INDEX (41), $PROD (37) and person-denoting signs (29). Manual checking showed that 67 of the 75 I1/I2 tokens introduce the signer as the referent of the following CA.
  • Limitations:
    • Annotation of CA is incomplete.
    • The KWIC view cannot resolve reference or clause-like unit boundaries.
    • The author decided against using translations as a proxy for clause boundaries, since this risks analysing the German translation's structure rather than the signing itself.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Universität HamburgHamburg · Germany81 works · 5,549 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 17,450 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 17,296 worksPsychology · 1,649 worksDevelopmental and Educational Psychology · 523 works

Cite

Cite as Sabrina Wähl. 2026. KWIC view on Constructed Action (CA) and its Collocates in German Sign Language (DGS) – Possibilities and Limitations. Proceedings of the LREC 2026 12th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Language in Motion.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/57tm3w2rr3ko

@inproceedings{wahl2026kwic,
  title = {{KWIC view on Constructed Action (CA) and its Collocates in German Sign Language (DGS) – Possibilities and Limitations}},
  author = {Sabrina Wähl},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the LREC 2026 12th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Language in Motion},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/57tm3w2rr3ko},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/57tm3w2rr3ko}
}

References

25 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Paul G. Dudis. 2004. Body Partitioning and Real-Space Blends. Cognitive Linguistics, 15(2):223– 238. find
  2. Karen Emmorey. 1999. Do Signers gesture? In Lynn Messing and Ruth Campbell, editors, Gesture, Speech, and Sign, pages 133–158. Oxford University Press. find
  3. Lindsay Ferrara and Trevor Johnston. 2014. Elaborating Who’s What: A Study of Constructed Action and Clause Structure in Auslan (Australian Sign Language). Australian Journal of Linguistics, 34(2):193–215. find
  4. Renate Fischer and Simon Kollien. 2010. Gibt es Constructed Action in Deutscher Gebärdensprache und in Deutsch (in der Textsorte Bedeu-tungserklärung)? DAS ZEICHEN, 24(86):502– 510. find
  5. Lynn A. Friedman. 1975. Space, Time, and Person Reference in American Sign Language. Language, 51(4):940–961. find
  6. Thomas Hanke and Jakob Storz. 2008. iLex – a Database Tool for Integrating Sign Language Corpus Linguistics and Sign Language Lexicography. In Proceedings of the LREC2008 3rd Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Construction and Exploitation of Sign Language Corpora, page… find
  7. Annika Herrmann and Nina-Kristin Pendzich. 2018. Between Narrator and Protagonist in Fables of German Sign Language. In Annika Hübl and Markus Steinbach, editors, Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, volume 247, pages 275– 308. John Benjamins Publishing Company. find
  8. Annika Herrmann and Markus Steinbach. 2010. Eine neue Perspektive auf Role Shift in Deutscher Gebärdensprache (DGS) – Per-spektivwechsel als nichtmanuelles Kongruen-zphänomen. DAS ZEICHEN, 24(84):112–118. find
  9. Lynn Hou. 2022. Looking for Multi-Word Expressions in American Sign Language. Cognitive Linguistics, 33:291–337. find
  10. Kearsy Cormier, Sandra Smith, and Zed Sevcikova-Sehyr. 2015. Rethinking Constructed Action. Sign Language & Linguistics, 18(2):167–204. find
  11. Christian Cuxac. 2000. Iconicity of Sign Languages. In M. Martin Taylor, Françoise Néel, and Don Bouwhuis, editors, The Structure of Multimodal Dialogue II, pages 321–334. John Benjamins Publishing Company. find
  12. Trevor Johnston. 2024. Auslan Corpus Annotation Guidelines. find
  13. Annemarie Kocab, Jennie Pyers, and Ann Senghas. 2015. Referential Shift in Nicaraguan Sign Language: A Transition from lexical to spatial Devices. Frontiers in Psychology, 5:1–13. find
  14. Reiner Konrad, Thomas Hanke, Amy Isard, Marc Schulder, Lutz König, Julian Bleicken, and Oliver Böse. 2024. Corpus à la carte – improving Access to the Public DGS Corpus. In Proceedings of the LREC-COLING 2024 11th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Evaluation of Sign La… find
  15. Reiner Konrad, Thomas Hanke, Gabriele Langer, Dolly Blanck, Julian Bleicken, Ilona Hofmann, Olga Jeziorski, Lutz König, Susanne König, Rie Nishio, Anja Regen, Uta Salden, Sven Wagner, Satu Worseck, Oliver Böse, Elena Jahn, and Marc Schulder. 2020. MEINE DGS – annotiert. Öffentliches Korpus der Deuts… find
  16. Rose Stamp and Wendy Sandler. 2021. The Emergence of Referential Shift Devices in three young Sign Languages. Lingua, 257:103070. find
  17. Ted Suppalla. 1986. The Classifier System in American Sign Language. In Colette G. Craig, editor, Typological Studies in Language, volume 7, pages 181–214. John Benjamins Publishing Company. find
  18. Elizabeth A. Winston. 1991. Spatial Referencing and Cohesion in an American Sign Language Text. Sign Language Studies, (73):397–410. find
  19. Reiner Konrad, Thomas Hanke, Gabriele Langer, Susanne König, Lutz König, Rie Nishio, and Anja Regen. 2022. Öffentliches DGS-Korpus: Annotationskonventionen / Public DGS Corpus: Annotation Conventions. Project Note AP03-2018-01, DGS-Korpus project, IDGS, Hamburg University, Hamburg, Germany. find
  20. Gabriele Langer, Anke Müller, Sabrina Wähl, Felicitas Otte, Lea Sepke, and Thomas Hanke. Digitales Wörterbuch der Deutschen Gebärdensprache. Das korpusbasierte Wörterbuch DGS – Deutsch. find
  21. Scott K. Liddell and Melanie Metzger. 1998. Gesture in Sign Language Discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 30(6):657–697. find
  22. Diane Lillo-Martin. 2012. Utterance Reports and Constructed Action. In Roland Pfau, Markus Steinbach, and Bencie Woll, editors, Sign Language, pages 365–387. De Gruyter Mouton. find
  23. Mark A. Mandel. 1977. Iconic Devices in American Sign Language. In Lynn A. Friedman, editor, On the Other Hand: New Perspectives on American Sign Language, Language, Thought, and Culture, pages 57–108. Academic Press. find
  24. Melanie Metzger. 1995. Constructed Dialogue and Constructed Action in American Sign Language. In Ceil Lucas, editor, Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities, pages 255–271. Gallaudet University Press. find
  25. Uta Salden and Reiner Konrad. 2014. Auswahl von Aufnahmen für das Teilkorpus. Project Note AP06-2013-01v02, DGS-Korpus project, IDGS, Hamburg University, Hamburg, Germany. find

Updated

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/wahl-2026-kwic-view-constructed-action-ca/