---
title: "KWIC view on Constructed Action (CA) and its Collocates in"
description: "This study instead examines spontaneous signing. 25 references. Among them: 0."
authors: ["Sabrina Wähl"]
year: 2026
venue: "Proceedings of the LREC 2026 12th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Language in Motion"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/2026.signlang-1.50/"
doi: "10.63317/57tm3w2rr3ko"
licence: "CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA, LREC proceedings)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/wahl-2026-kwic-view-constructed-action-ca/"
---
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# KWIC view on Constructed Action (CA) and its Collocates in German Sign Language (DGS) – Possibilities and Limitations

**Authors:** Sabrina Wähl · **Year:** 2026 · **Venue:** [Proceedings of the LREC 2026 12th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Language in Motion](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/signlang/) ([LREC Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Language in Motion 2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/signlang/2026/)) · **Publisher:** [European Language Resources Association (ELRA)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/european-language-resources-association-elra/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA, LREC proceedings)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2026.signlang-1.50/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2026.signlang-1.50.pdf) · [DOI 10.63317/57tm3w2rr3ko](https://doi.org/10.63317/57tm3w2rr3ko) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W7166570930)

**Citations:** 0 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
Most research on constructed action (CA), where a signer takes on a referent's role to show their actions, relies on story retellings driven by stimuli. This study instead examines spontaneous signing. It asks how much a keyword-in-context (KWIC) concordance view, a common tool in spoken-language lexicography, can reveal about which signs co-occur with CA in German Sign Language (DGS). The data are the Free conversation sessions of the Public DGS Corpus. In this corpus, CA is not glossed directly but is sometimes noted by annotators in a comment tier, so CA coverage is partial. An SQL query over the iLex database retrieved CA comments together with the glosses aligned with them and the glosses just before them. The frequency patterns fit earlier claims: CA tends to involve gestures and classifier constructions, and 'look' signs act as CA cues, as reported for ASL. However, the KWIC view cannot show who a sign refers to or where clause boundaries fall, so the author had to check tokens manually. The study concludes that concordance lines work well as one method among several but are insufficient alone.

## Key points
- **Data:** 34 Free conversation transcripts (68 participants) from the Public DGS Corpus, which is drawn from the roughly 560-hour DGS corpus. The query returned 486 CA annotations from 47 signers across 27 transcripts.
- **Search window:** The window was first set to 5 preceding signs and then reduced to 3, because no patterns emerged at the wider range. Usable patterns appeared within 2 preceding signs.
- **Signs aligned with CA:** $GEST (91), $PROD (71), I1/I2 (39), $INDEX (39) and TO-LOOK variants (34). Of the 39 I1/I2 tokens, 30 referred to the signer and 9 to third persons.
- **Signs immediately preceding CA:** I1/I2 (75), $GEST (41), $INDEX (41), $PROD (37) and person-denoting signs (29). Manual checking showed that 67 of the 75 I1/I2 tokens introduce the signer as the referent of the following CA.
- **Limitations:**
  - Annotation of CA is incomplete.
  - The KWIC view cannot resolve reference or clause-like unit boundaries.
  - The author decided against using translations as a proxy for clause boundaries, since this risks analysing the German translation's structure rather than the signing itself.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

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## Cite

Cite as: Sabrina Wähl. 2026. KWIC view on Constructed Action (CA) and its Collocates in German Sign Language (DGS) – Possibilities and Limitations. Proceedings of the LREC 2026 12th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Language in Motion.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{wahl2026kwic,
  title = {{KWIC view on Constructed Action (CA) and its Collocates in German Sign Language (DGS) – Possibilities and Limitations}},
  author = {Sabrina Wähl},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the LREC 2026 12th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Language in Motion},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/57tm3w2rr3ko},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/57tm3w2rr3ko}
}
```

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*Updated 1 November 2026*