The Division into Parts of Speech in the Corpus-based Dictionary of Polish Sign Language

Recent decades have seen a spectacular development in sign language lexicography, both in technological and theoretical terms. This new subfield of lexicography has encountered numerous challenges, related to the structural differences between spoken and sign languages. One of these challenges has been how the issue of dividing words into different parts of speech (POS) should be handled for sign languages. For both theoretical and sociolinguistic reasons (Linde-Usiekniewicz & Olko 2006, Linde-Usiekniewicz et. al 2014, 2016), the Corpus-based Dictionary of Polish Sign Language compiled at the University of Warsaw provides Polish descriptive sense definitions instead of sets of equivalents. Since the morpho-syntax of spoken Polish makes it impossible to adequately define a sense without imposing a POS interpretation on it, we decided to introduce a functional division of senses in the entry structure. Thus, four usage types have been distinguished for PJM (polski jezyk migowy, Polish Sign Language), defined by their resemblance to the traditional POS pattern: a noun-like, verb-like, adjective-like, and adverb-like usage. Each of these types of usage was established partly on semantic grounds (Wierzbicka 2000), and partly on syntactic grounds (Meir 2013). Interestingly, this procedure has also led us to identify usage types with no obvious counterparts in the traditional POS system, namely signs used autonomously, i.e. in a separate utterance.