Spoken and Signed Languages Hand in Hand: Parallel and Directly Comparable Corpora of French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB) and French

Linguistics as a discipline only began to consider signed languages as legitimate, fully-fledged linguistic systems from the 1960s onwards. However, comparative work of signed and spoken languages made so far has struggled to draw on similar methodologies. In this paper, we seek to fill in this gap by presenting a recently built set of multilingual corpora, allowing scholars to conduct comparative studies of French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB), and its ambient spoken language, French. This article outlines the theoretical developments which have led to the creation of these corpora, highlighting two breakthroughs in the understanding of human communicative practices, i.e., the emergence of signed language linguistics and the development of comparative semiotics. We show that combining these recent theoretical insights with the new methodological tools holds potential for future research avenues that could broaden and improve our understanding of language use.