Spoken Corpus Linguistics

From Monomodal to Multimodal

Svenja Adolphs, Ronald Carter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415888295
• eBook ISBN: 9781134056705
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

In this book, Adolphs and Carter explore key approaches to work in spoken corpus linguistics. The book discusses some of the pioneering challenges faced in designing, building and utilising insights from the analysis of spoken corpora, arguing that, even though writing is heavily privileged in corpus research, the spoken language can reveal patterns of language use that are both different and distinctive and that this has important implications for the way in which language is described, for the study of human communication and for the field of applied linguistics as a whole.

Spoken Corpus Linguistics is divided into two main parts. The first part sets the scene by discussing traditional and new approaches to monomodal spoken corpus analysis, with a focus on discourse organisation and conversational interaction and with particular attention to forms of language such as discourse markers and multi-word units, areas of language not conventionally described but which are argued to be of importance to spoken language description and to spoken language learning and teaching research within the field of applied linguistics. The second part of the book moves into the multimodal domain and focuses on alignments between language and gesture in a spoken corpus, with particular reference to gestural movements of the head and the hand and to the different ways in which prosody might be used to enhance communication. A brief final chapter discusses new developments in the area of spoken corpus research, including the relationship between language and context, emerging research methods as well as discussing possible shifts in scope and emphasis in spoken corpus research in the future.

Part I

Monomodal Spoken Corpus Analysis

1 Making a Start

Building and Analyzing a Spoken Corpus

1.0 INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW

The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of some of the main approaches to spoken corpus research and to explore the contributions that may be made by corpus analysis toward the study of spoken language. Among the topics discussed are the design of spoken corpora and how they differ from written corpus design; issues involved in the transcription and coding of spoken data; the role of metadata that accounts for the participants and contexts for the recorded speech; and particular questions of research ethics that intersect with the collection, coding, representation and storage of the data. By reviewing previous work in this way, the chapter also aims to lay a basis for discussions in the following chapters of the ways in which recent monomodal and multimodal spoken corpus research has extended and enriched these foundations.

What Is a Spoken Corpus?

Spoken corpora provide a unique resource for the exploration of naturally occurring discourse; and the growing interest in the development of spoken corpora is testament to the value they provide to a diverse number of research communities. Following the early developments of relatively small spoken corpora in the 1960s, such as the London-Lund corpus (Svartvik, 1990), the past two decades have seen major advances in the collection and development of spoken corpora, particularly but not exclusively in the English language. Some examples of spoken corpora are the Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English (CANCODE) (McCarthy, 1998), a five-million word corpus collected mainly in Britain and Ireland; the Limerick Corpus of Irish English (LCIE) (Farr et al., 2004); the Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English (HKCSE) (Cheng and Warren, 1999, 2000, 2002); the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) (Simpson et al., 2000) and the spoken components of the British National Corpus (BNC) (www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk) and the COBUILD Bank of English (www.mycobuild.com/about-collins-corpus.aspx). In addition, there is a growing interest in the development of spoken corpora of international varieties of English and other languages: for example, the International Corpus of English (ICE corpus: ice-corpora.net/ice/index.htm), as well as of corpora of learner language aimed at the development and assessment of competencies on the part of learners of English as a second or foreign language (Bolton et al., 2003; De Cock et al., 1998; the English Profile Cambridge Learner Corpus www.englishprofile.org). These corpora provide researchers with rich samples of spoken language-in-use, which form the basis of new and emerging descriptions of naturally occurring discourse.

Research outputs based on the analysis of spoken corpora are wide ranging and include, for example, descriptions of lexis and grammar (Biber and Conrad, 1999; Carter and McCarthy, 2006), discourse particles (Aijmer 2002), courtroom talk (Cotterill, 2004), media discourse (O’Keeffe, 2006), language teaching and learning (O’Keeffe et al., 2007) and health-care communication (Adolphs et al., 2004, 2007). This research covers phenomena at utterance level as well as at the level of discourse. A number of studies (e.g., McCarthy, 1998) start with the exploration of concordance outputs and frequency information as a point of entry into the data and carry out subsequent analyses at the level of discourse, while others start with a discourse analytical approach followed by subsequent analyses of concordance data.

Before a spoken corpus can be subjected to this kind of analysis, the data has to be collected, transcribed, and categorized in a way that allows the researcher to address specific research questions. This chapter deals with the basic steps that need to be taken when assembling a spoken corpus for research purposes. We will discuss the different considerations behind corpus design and data collection as well as associated issues of permission and ethics, transcription and representation of spoken discourse.

1.1 CORPUS DESIGN

Issues of basic corpus design need to be addressed prior to any discussion of the content of the corpus, or of the methods used to organize the data. Often, design and construction principles are locally determined (Conrad, 2002: 77); however, some principles articulated in relation to corpus design by Sinclair (Sinclair, 2005) can be seen as general guidelines for both spoken and written corpora. Sinclair sets out the following guidelines:

1. The contents of a corpus should be selected without regard for the language they contain, but according to their communicative functions in the contexts and communities in which the data is collected.

2 The corpus should be as representative as possible of the target language.

3. While still maintaining coverage of the language as a whole, a corpus should aim to be homogeneous in all its different components.

4. Criteria for determining the structure of a corpus should be small in number, clearly separate from each other, and be efficient as a group in delineating a corpus that is representative of the language or variety under examination.

5. Any information about a text (for example, information about the age, gender, social class of speakers) should be stored separately from the plain text and only merged when required in applications.

6. Samples of language for a corpus should, wherever possible, consist of entire documents or transcriptions of complete speech events, or should get as close to this target as possible. This means that samples will differ substantially in size.

7. The design and composition of a corpus should be documented fully, together with information about the corpus contents as well as the reasons that support all the decisions taken.

8. The corpus builder should retain, as target notions, representativeness and balance. While these are not precis...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Monomodal Spoken Corpus Analysis
• Part II Multimodal Spoken Corpus Analysis
• Appendix Transcription Conventions
• Notes
• References
• Index