The development of signed language lexical databases, digital organizations that describe different phonological features of and attempt to establish relationships between signs has resulted in a renewed interest in the phonological descriptions used to uniquely identify and organize the lexicons of respective sign languages (van der Kooij, 2002; Fenlon et al., 2016; Brentari et al., 2018). Throughout the mutually shared coding process involved in organizing two lexical databases, ASL Signbank (Hochgesang, Crasborn and Lillo-Martin, 2020) and ASL-LEX (Caselli et al., 2016), issues have arisen that require revisiting how phonological features and categories are to be applied and even decided upon, and which would adequately distinguish lexical contrast for respective sign languages. The paper concludes by exploring the inverse of the theory-to-database relationship. Examples are given of theoretical implications and research questions that arise from consequences of language resource building. These are presented as evidence that not only does theory impact organization of databases but that the process of database creation can also inform our theories.

We report on a method used to develop a sizable parallel corpus of English and American Sign Language (ASL). The effort is part of the Gallaudet University Documentation of ASL (GUDA) project, which is currently coordinated by an interdisciplinary team from the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Interpretation and Translation at Gallaudet University. Creation of the parallel corpus makes use of the available SRT (SubRip Subtitle) files of ASL videos that have been interpreted into or from English, or captioned into English. The corpus allows for one-way searches based on the English translation or interpretation, which is useful for translators, interpreters, and those conducting comparative analyses. We conclude with a discussion of important considerations for this method of constructing a parallel corpus, as well as next steps that will help to refine the development and utility of this type of corpus.