Register und Textsorten in der Deutschen Gebärdensprache: Eine korpusbasierte Annäherung

The article starts off by explaining characteristics of the German deafcommunity and its signed language with reference to relevant historical andsocial factors as well as in relation to spoken and written German. Thestate of research in the field of sign language-related text linguistics issummarized and the problematic notion of text is discussed in general aswell as in relation to signed languages. The aims and methods of a projectfocussing on text types in German Sign Language (Deutsche Gebärdensprache,DGS), carried out at the University of Applied Sciences Magdeburg-Stendal, are presented. On the basis of data generated in this projectand taking so-called finger loci as an example, it is shown how text typesand registers in a signed language can tentatively be identified with referenceto the concept of linguistic distance (“Nähe- und Distanzsprache„,Koch/Oesterreicher 1990). In conclusion, the article looks at current trendsof development in signed text types.