This paper describes a method for annotating the Japanese Sign Language (JSL) dialogue corpus. We developed a way to identify interactional boundaries and define a ‘utterance unit’ in sign language using various multimodal features accompanying signing. The utterance unit is an original concept for segmenting and annotating sign language dialogue referring to signer’s native sense from the perspectives of Conversation Analysis (CA) and Interaction Studies. First of all, we postulated that we should identify a fundamental concept of interaction-specific unit for understanding interactional mechanisms, such as turn-taking (Sacks et al. 1974), in sign-language social interactions. Obviously, it does should not relying on a spoken language writing system for storing signings in corpora and making translations. We believe that there are two kinds of possible applications for utterance units: one is to develop corpus linguistics research for both signed and spoken corpora; the other is to build an informatics system that includes, but is not limited to, a machine translation system for sign languages.

We began building a corpus of Japanese Sign Language (JSL) in April 2011. The purpose of this project was to increase awareness of sign language as a distinctive language in Japan. This corpus is beneficial not only to linguistic research but also to hearing-impaired and deaf individuals, as it helps them to recognize and respect their linguistic differences and communication styles. This is the first large-scale JSL corpus developed for both academic and public use. We collected data in three ways: interviews (for introductory purposes only), dialogues, and lexical elicitation. In this paper, we focus particularly on data collected during a dialogue to discuss the application of conversation analysis (CA) to signed dialogues and signed conversations. Our annotation scheme was designed not only to elucidate theoretical issues related to grammar and linguistics but also to clarify pragmatic and interactional phenomena related to the use of JSL.