The DGS Corpus was collected in order to document German Sign Language (DGS) for linguistic research, compile the corpus-based dictionary DW-DGS and provide a cultural resource for the language community. Regional aspects played a key role in participant selection, data collection tasks and procedures, as well as in annotation work. Regional granularity implemented had to be a compromise between research interests, corpus size, and privacy issues of participants. In the lexicographic work maps are used to visualize regional distribution of single signs as well as of groups of competing synonyms. Maps are a tool for data exploration, and they support data interpretation as well as quality assurance of the annotation. As they provide an intuitive access to distributional facts maps are also an important element in the dictionary.

This article discusses some of the methodological factors taken into consideration in a first, and still ongoing, study of lexical similarity between German Sign Language (Deutsche Gebärdensprache, DGS) and Swiss German Sign Language (Deutschschweizerische Gebärdensprache, DSGS). For our investigation we followed the approach of Xu (2006) and Su and Tai (2009) by taking iconicity into account. However, whereas these earlier studies operated on the general concept of iconic motivation, we have added a more specific method of labeling both the image-producing techniques and (when possible) the underlying image and/or motivating elements (Langer 2005), which we believe are necessary for a more precise understanding of how lexical pairs from the two languages compare with regard to identity, similarity, and difference.

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This paper looks at the lexemes DONEα and DONEβ in the Public DGS Corpus to find out whether they have a tendency to occur more frequently in sentence-final position than elsewhere and are therefore good cues for identifying sentence boundaries in German Sign Language (DGS). Since the Public DGS Corpus does not contain annotations of sentence boundaries or continuous syntactic tagging, we used time-aligned German translations as provisional sentential units. DONEα and DONEβ were selected since the literature suggests that they are best analyzed as right-peripheral heads. Additionally, we compared the distribution of DONEα to that of ALREADYα, which served as a baseline. The results suggest that DONEα and DONEβ indeed occur more often at the end of a translation tag than elsewhere in DGS. A more detailed analysis of a randomly selected subset of tokens of DONEα and DONEβ revealed that some of their functions are associated more strongly with sentential boundaries than others. Restrictive focus and discourse marker uses occur more consistently in the final position than, e.g., aspectual uses.