Resumen de Challenges in the research of relative clause constructions in signed languages to date
The main focus of the paper is to discuss how the complex occurrences of relative clauseconstructions in different signed languages can highlight dis-/advantages of some meth-ods of data collection and how we can best design studies to fully depict the realitiesof signed languages’ discourse. I provide an overview of current insights into relativeclause constructions in signed languages. I aim to reflect on the challenges works havefaced to date and discuss how these might be overcome by pulling in approaches andmethods not used (to their full potential) on this research topic so far. Eliciting data is alogical strategy to hopefully gain more insight into how relative clauses work in signedlanguages - however, we risk eliciting only very specific, limited occurrences and notgetting the full picture which can only be found in more complex texts. Therefore, thisoverview shows how corpus studies on relative clause constructions could be a fruitfuladdition to the field in the future. To date, there are very few studies that have taken thisapproach that admittedly poses new challenges of understanding these constructionswhen they take wildly different forms in naturalistic data and employ markers that areboth not obligatory and not limited to this specific construction
