Natural and elicited: Sign language corpus linguistics and linguistic ethnography as complementary methodologies

Researchers have used a range of methodological approaches for investigating the sociolinguistics of sign languages, two of which are corpus linguistics (CL) and linguistic ethnography (LE). These complementary approaches respect the complexity of language variation and the sociolinguistic reality of sign languages existing within ambient majority and spoken language ecologies; both emphasize the necessity of strong researcher and community relationships; and both involve analysis of natural and elicited data. However, sign language CL and LE have distinct epistemic and methodological identities, including different perspectives on what kind of data is valuable and preferred toolkits for exploring aspects of sign language use.