Funded by Faculty of Arts, Prof Gladys Tang, Prof Felix Sze and a team of researchers and sign interpreters of CSLDS attended The 16th China International Conference of Contemporary Linguistics（第十六屆中國當代語言學國際研討會） in Shanghai, China. The conference set a specific forum for sign linguistics, which was the first time in history among linguistic conferences in Mainland China. CSLDS was the cooperating organizer of the Sign Language Forum. We arranged two teams of sign interpreters for keynote speeches and the Sign Language Forum on 29-30 October: HKSL to Mandarin/English and CSL to Mandarin/English. This was also the first time that a linguistic conference in Mainland China is provided with sign interpretation.

As one of the keynote speakers of the conference, Prof Gladys Tang gave a presentation: Functions of Sign Language Classifiers.

At the Sign Language Forum, the invited speaker, Prof Onno Crasborn of Radbound University, the Netherlands, gave a talk on sign language documentation: Sign Language Corpora as Linguistic Tools. Prof Felix Sze, two Research Postgraduate students, one junior research assistant, three Deaf and one hearing undergraduate students conducted seven presentations related to their research projects:

1. Comparing the basic constituent orders of Hong Kong Sign Language, JakSL and Siri Lanka Sign Language – Prof Felix Sze
2. Strategies of Reflexivization in Hong Kong Sign Language – Miss Li Jia
3. Doubling in Japanese Sign Language – Mr Eita Endo
4. Wh-cleft in Hong Kong Sign Language – Miss Gan Linghui
5. Reduplication in Hong Kong Sign Language – Mr Chu Kwan Ngai Kenny
6. Role-Shifting in Jakarta Sign Language: Head, Eye and Body Movement in Constructed Actions – Miss Laura Lesmana Wijaya
7. Non-manual markers associated with pronouns-the interaction between linguistics and non-linguistics element in HKSL storytelling – Mr Wong Yiu Leung Aaron and Miss Yu Sze Mei Jamie

Our researchers had a good discussion with other presenters from around China and other countries. Many of the participants of the conference also expressed their appreciation of the sign interpretation.