Adolphs, S. and Carter, R. (2013). Spoken Corpus Linguistics: From Monomodal to Multimodal. London: Routledge

Abstract

Svenja Adolphs and Ronald Carter’s ‘Spoken Corpus Linguistics: From Monomodal to Multimodal’ (2013, Routledge) is one of the innovative and advanced volumes in the fields of corpus linguistics and pragmatics. It illuminates the emergent areas of spoken corpus linguistics and covers a variety of issues from practical guidelines for designing spoken and multimodal corpora to some pedagogic implications derived from the analyses using these corpora. It also offers several case studies on discursive practices, prosody, listener responses, and gestures in talk. With these areas of focus, this volume makes a distinct contribution to the series, Routledge Advances in Corpus Linguistics. The book is divided into two parts: monomodal spoken corpus analysis and multimodal spoken corpus analysis. Monomodal spoken corpus analysis focuses on one mode, spoken language, in other words, ‘textual dimension of communication’ (p. 1), while multimodal spoken corpus analysis deals with plural and diverse aspects in spoken interaction which include ‘textual, prosodic and gestural representations’ (ibid). The former introduces a practical framework for design and development of spoken corpora, and includes case studies of monomodal spoken corpus analysis on multi-word units and discourse markers. In the latter part, the book moves from monomodal corpus analysis to multimodal corpus analysis, where studies on prosody and gestures are presented. This cutting-edge work will stimulate its readers’ ingenuity, and take corpus research forward into its next stage.