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The Construction of the CORALSE Corpus, Now and Beyond: A Tool for Documenting Spanish Sign Language

The main objective of this paper is to present the experience of building the CORALSE corpus and to discuss the challenges that arise when attempting to provide a comprehensive description of a sign language. To this end, we address the following questions, drawing on the data obtained in the completed phases of the CORALSE project as well as on the foundational principles guiding the project’s third phase. THE CORALSE CORPUS TODAY: How have we developed a linguistic corpus of sign language?, What steps have we taken in developing the CORALSE corpus?, Which informants have we recorded and what criteria have guided their selection? THE CORALSE CORPUS IN THE FUTURE: Which (native) languages do we prioritise when selecting informants?, How do the perspectives of reference signers, interpreters, educators, and psycholinguists contribute to a more complete understanding of a sign language? Corpus linguistics is understood as a set of methodologies designed to study language through collections of digitised texts. Its development over recent decades—initially driven by advances in computing and, subsequently, by the emergence of the internet—represents one of the most significant transformations in contemporary linguistic research. The projects CORALSE: Annotated Inter-university Corpus of Spanish Sign Language and Textual Typology, Registers and Styles in Spanish Sign Language: New Data for the Expansion of the CORALSE Corpus adopt a corpus linguistics approach to collect, analyse and describe a representative sample of Spanish Sign Language (LSE). We also reflect on the types of linguistic data that are truly necessary to document the actual use of Spanish Sign Language.