Spoken Language Corpora Research Articles

Accessing Phonetic Variation in Spoken Language Corpora through Non-standard Orthography

Much of the sociolinguistic and stylistic variation which is of interest to linguists is phonetic in nature, but the access route to corpus data is typically via a textual transcription. This poses a significant problem for a researcher who wishes to access the original recordings of speech in order to analyse variation: how can they search for relevant data? Many transcription traditions allow for the representation of such variation through non-standard orthography, and such conventions should therefore allow access to data relevant to the study of variation. However, the specific conventions used vary between traditions (and indeed may not be applied consistently by individual transcribers). This then creates another problem where the researcher wishes to access data across an aggregated collection, which is a practical necessity given the relatively limited size of most corpora of spoken language. In this paper, we analyse the conventions used in two of the component collections in the Australian National Corpus, the Australian Radio Talkback Corpus and the Monash Corpus of Spoken English. On the basis of this analysis, we develop a fragment of an ontology which gives an explicit account of the phenomena related to non-standard pronunciation represented in the transcripts and which can therefore act as the basis for better searching of the collections and better access to relevant data for analysing sociolinguistic and stylistic variation.

Some aspects of prosody of Korean coordinating connective endings in a spoken language corpus

Some aspects of prosody of Korean coordinating connective endings in a spoken language corpus

Do we teach the real language?

This article is about the type of language that is offered to learners in textbooks, using the example of Russian. Many modern textbooks of Russian as a foreign language aim at efficient development of oral communication skills. However, some expressions used in the textbooks are not typical for everyday language. We claim that textbooks’ content should be reassessed based on actual language use, following theoretical and methodological models of cognitive and corpus linguistics. We extracted language patterns from three textbooks, and compared them with alternative patterns that carry similar meaning by (1) calculating the frequency of occurrence of each pattern in a corpus of spoken language, and (2) using Russian native speakers’ intuitions about what is more common. The results demonstrated that for 39 to 53 percent of all the recurrent patterns in the textbooks better alternatives could be found. We further investigated the typical shortcomings of the extracted patterns.

The Operation of Cool Edit Pro in Corpus-Based Spoken Language

Corpus refers to the database of language materials. Cool Edit Pro is a media edit software. This paper explores how to construct spoken language corpus, how to use cool edit pro 2 to make sound wave contrast and give the experimenters an intuitive observation from their own speech waveforms. The key is to offer the obvious waveforms contrast among the sampling waveform of the native speaker, the original and unmodified one of the experimenter and the new waveform of the experimenter after modifications and teachers instructions, which makes the oral autonomic learning more possible and scientific. From long wave or short wave, wave trough or wave crest, smooth wave or sharp wave, the experimenters deviations can be easily identified from the standard during the autonomic practices and efficiently make corrections. Additionally, experimenter also can observe the improvements frequently, which means this experiment more instructive.

The semantics of Moroccan Arabic dar ‘do’ in typological perspective

Abstract This paper is a case study in the exploration of the semantic range of single a high-frequency lexical item on the basis of a corpus of spoken language, in this case Moroccan Arabic. Generalised action verbs (‘do’ verbs) are an interesting object of study because cross-linguistically, they can exhibit a wide range of functions including that of causative verb, verb of creation, verb in agentive collocations, verbaliser with loan words and mimetic expressions, quotative verb, and even a copula-like use with property predicates (Schultze-Berndt 2008). Against this typological background, the range of functions of Moroccan Arabic dar ‘do’ is investigated.

Who are ‘we’ in spoken Peninsular Spanish and European Portuguese? Expression and reference of first person plural subject pronouns

Peninsular Spanish (PS) and European Portuguese (EP) are null subject languages where subject person is expressed by verbal affixes and the use of subject pronouns is considered to be reserved e.g. for such purposes as the expression of contrast or emphasis. However, the use of pronominal subjects differs strikingly between the two languages. The present study examines the use of first person plural subject pronouns (PS nosotros and EP no´s) in corpora of spoken language and connects it with the different referential properties of first person plural. It is shown that in PS the expression of the subject pronoun nosotros is rare – it occurs only in 4.5% of all clauses with first person plural subjects – and the reference of the pronoun is always hearer-exclusive in the data under survey. In EP, the expression of the first person plural subject pronoun no´s is more frequent, occurring in 32.2% of the clauses with first person plural subjects. In EP, the use of the pronoun is not restricted to the hearer-exclusive reading but is also found in contexts where the reference is construed as hearer-inclusive or impersonal. A further difference between PS and EP is that the latter has developed, in addition to first person plural proper, another construction with first person plural reference consisting of the expression a gente (literally ‘the people’) and a verb in third person singular. In the data examined, the construction with a gente is favoured with certain non-agentive verb lexemes: this tendency is argued to be connected with the origin of a gente as an impersonalizing strategy. Using evidence from contrastive analysis of two closely related languages, the paper argues that null subject languages and grammatical persons are highly divergent with regard to the frequency of subject pronoun expression and the factors affecting it.

When BEAT becomes HOUSE: Factors of word final /t/-deletion in German

The deletion and reduction of alveolar /t/ is a phenomenon that has been given considerable attention in the research on speech production and perception. Data have mainly be drawn from spoken language corpora, where a tight control over contributing factors of /t/-deletion is hardly possible. Here, we present a new way of creating a spoken language corpus adhering to some crucial factors we wanted to hold constant for the investigation of word-final /t/-deletion in German. German is especially interesting with regard to /t/-deletion due to its rich suffixal morphology, attributing morphological status to word-final /t/ in many paradigms. We focused on verb inflection and employed a verb form production task for creating a concise corpus of naturally spoken language in which we could control for factors previously established to affect /t/-deletion. We then determined the best estimators for /t/-productions (i.e. canonical, deleted, or reduced) in our corpus. The influence of extra-linguistic factors was comparable to previous studies. We suggest that our method of constructing a natural language corpus with carefully selected characteristics is a viable way for the examination of deletions and reductions during speech production. Furthermore, we found that the best predictor for non-canonical productions and deletions was the following phonological context.

Detailed phonetic memory for multi-word and part-word sequences

AbstractHumans recognize previously heard spoken words better when repetitions of the words involve identical productions than productions by a different speaker. Such findings have been taken as evidence that perceived instances of words or sub-lexical units are stored in a detailed form in memory, and that collections of these memory traces comprise or are linked to mental lexical representations. This study tested a different possibility, that detailed acoustic memory occurs during spoken language processing but does not necessarily correspond to words or other traditionally defined units. Two experiments examined lexical access and recognition memory for continuous speech sequences, extracted from a spoken language corpus, as a function of sequence length and onset phase (with respect to word onset), and speaker. Qualitatively different patterns between word identification and memory performance based on these three variables provide little evidence for a role of the word level of representation in memory for the sequences, and suggest that memory-based processing may more independent of this level than has been assumed.

'Tails' of Linguistic Survival

Given the relatively short history of computerized corpora of spoken language, it is not surprising that few diachronic studies have been done on the grammatical features recently highlighted by the analysis of such corpora. This article, however, does take a diachronic perspective on one such feature: the syntactic feature of ‘tails’ (Dik 1978). The use of tails is analyzed in terms of form, frequency, and function in a 50,000 word corpus of informal conversations which took place in the North of England between 1937 and 1940. This analysis shows that tails were a systematic and quite frequent feature of spoken English at that time. It also shows that there are marked similarities in terms of form and function between tails in this small corpus and those in more widely based contemporary corpora. The article argues that the durability of tails may lie in the fact that the feature has both an important psycholinguistic function and important affective functions and concludes that this kind of diachronic research is of great potential value for spoken language research.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Corpus Linguistics in the UK: Resources for Sociolinguistic Research

Linguistics has drawn on the large quantities of authentic data contained in language corpora for several decades now. While debates continue regarding the nature and interpretation of such data, it is generally accepted that corpus methodologies offer a valuable perspective on language, one that complements the introspective and elicited data used in different sub-fields of linguistics. Increasingly, language corpora can be searched or downloaded over the Internet, and are now therefore very readily accessible. Many also include demographic or textual metadata that make them invaluable as data for sociolinguistics. While existing corpora may have some drawbacks (e.g. where the corpus design is not ideally suited to the study in hand, or available corpora do not have appropriate mark-up), they offer great savings in time and effort compared to creating a new corpus. Moreover, especially given the increasing availability of spoken texts in corpora, they constitute excellent resources for students of different levels, for teachers looking for a quick way to demonstrate a feature of language, and for researchers testing linguistic hypotheses.

A puszta családnév mint (cseh)szlovák pragmatikai kölcsönzés

This paper focuses on a single name-related consequence of the language contact situation of Hungarian in the Carpathian basin: the use of surnames on their own (i.e. without Christian names) as sociolinguistic variants of Hungarian female names in the Slovakian variety of Hungarian. To support the conclusions drawn from a corpus of spoken language, the author examines inscriptions of surnames in the cemeteries of two Hungarian settlements, Nagymegyer (Vel'ký Meder) and Alsószeli (Dolné Saliby), both in Slovakia, paying special attention to Standard Slovakian, local Hungarian and Standard Hungarian usage. The final conclusion of the paper is that the phenomenon of erasing Christian names from the maiden names of married women can be observed in all classes of society of the Hungarian minority living in Slovakia. The use of bare surnames occurs virtually in all speech situations, both for mentioning and for addressing females, in speech as well as in writing. The phenomenon is presented with respect to formality vs. informality and standard vs. substandard speech. The author gives utmost care to the chronology of the spread of this Slovakian contact feature.

구어 말뭉치를 이용한 감탄사의 목록 보완 방안

This paper aims at finding exclamations that have been left off the list of existing Korean dictionaries using grammatically tagged spoken language corpus and presenting how to supplement the list. The corpus used in this paper is the grammatically tagged spoken language corpus of 〈21 th Century Sejong〉 (968,177 words). This is a valuable endeavor because there is no research or dictionary using a Korean spoken language corpus. This paper presents an exclamation list which was obtained from the analysis of the corpus and discusses how to describe in the dictionary. First, this paper discusses a standard word form. Second it discusses how to describe the hesitation filler in the Korean dictionary.

The Icelandic (Pilot) Project in ScanDiaSyn

In this paper we outline the Icelandic research plans in the Scandinavian Dialect Syntax project and explain why we have made these plans the way we have. We begin by reporting on a pilot project that was conducted in Iceland 2004-2005, explain its nature and describe the resulting plans. As will be seen, our research project includes the collection and analysis of spoken language corpora (“spontaneous speech” of different kinds), collection of syntactic material by using different elicitation techniques (including written questionnaires and interviews), and the comparison of this material. The spoken language corpora are listed and described in the second section of the paper. In the third section we describe how our present (and future) work relates to some previous work done on syntactic variation in Icelandic (and Faroese) and offer some thoughts on the nature of syntactic variation in general.

L’antéposition des compléments dans le français contemporain

In modern French, Noun Groups which fulfill a function of non prepositional complements (ie. direct objects) are traditionnally said to have a strictly fixed position after the verb, in contrast with other types of complements which have a freer distribution. Using data mostly drawn from spoken language corpora, we show that, contrary to commun assumptions, non prepositional complements are likely to be placed before the verb. In order to give a precise account, it appears necessary to make a distinction between two different types of pre-verbal complements. Such a distinction is made through the theoretical frame of macro-syntax.

Computational and Quantitative Studies

Part One: Machine translation: the early years Editor's Introduction 1 The linguistic basis of a mechanical thesaurus, and its application to English preposition classification 2 Linguistics and machine translation Part Two: Probabilistic grammar and the corpus Editor's Introduction 3 Towards probabilistic interpretations 4 Corpus studies and probabilistic grammar 5 Language as system and language as instance: the corpus as a theoretical construct 6 [with Z L James] A quantitative study of polarity and primary tense in the English Finite clause 7 Quantitative studies and probabilities in grammar 8 The spoken language corpus. Part Three: Towards 'intelligent computing' (computing with Meaning) Editor's Introduction 9 On language in relation to fuzzy logic and intelligent computing 10 Fuzzy grammatics: a systemic functional approach to fuzziness in neutral language 11 Computing meaning: some reflections on past experience and present prospects Appendix: Systems of the English clause: a trial grammar for the PENMAN text generation project. [Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California].

Transliteration between spoken language corpora

Comparison of languages and linguistic data is essential if progress in our understanding of the nature of spoken languages is to be made. We understand phenomena better through comparison and contrast. This paper discusses problems that arise in trying to transfer a spoken language corpus transcribed and formatted according to one standard into the standard and format of another corpus. The problems that arise are related both to the differences that exist between the standards of the corpora and to human errors leading to lack of reliability in creating the transcriptions. Although the discussion is based on transfer and transliteration between two specific corpora (the Danish BySoc, BySociolingvistisk Korpus, and the Swedish GSLC, Göteborg Spoken Language Corpus), we believe that the discussion in the article documents and highlights problems of a general kind which have to be faced whenever spoken language corpora of different formats are to be compared.

A Study of Types of Fragmentary Sentence Expressed in Corpus of Spoken Language

이 연구의 목적은 대학생 구어 말뭉치에 나타난 조각문의 특징과 그 실현 양상을 살펴봄으로써, 조각문의 통사적 유형을 밝히는 것이다. 이를 위해서 구어 말뭉치 2만 어절에 통사 정보 주석 태그 세트를 활용하여 구어 문장 유형을 분석하였다.br/ 조각문은 온전한 문장의 형태를 갖추지 않고, 감탄사나 부사어, 관형어등의 일부 문장 성분만으로 문장을 끝맺는 문장 유형을 가리키는 말이다. 그런데 일반적으로 문장은 '문장의 구성 성분들을 모두 갖춘 완전한 문장 형식'을 의미하는데, 이는 문어 중심으로 정의되어 온 문장의 개념이다. 하지만, 이러한 개념 규정으로는 구어에 흔히 나타나는, 여러 유형의 조각문 형태의 문장을 설명하기에는 어려운 부분이 많다. 따라서 이 연구에서는 구어 문형 분석의 기본 단위를 억양 단위로 분석함으로써, 문어와 다른 구어만의 다양한 문장 유형을 밝힐 수 있었다. 구어 말뭉치에서 조각문은 감탄사, 부사어, 체언, 명사구, 관형어 등의 유형이 나타난다. 특히, 구어 조각문 유형 가운데 높은 빈도로 실현된 감탄사나 부사어 유형은 본래의 통사적 기능인 감탄사나 부사어로서의 기능보다는 대화를 지속하기 위한 보조적인 수단으로 더 활발하게 사용되였다.br/ 이 연구는 지금까지 구어 문형에 관한 연구가 활발하게 이루어지지 않은 시점에서 구어 말뭉치에 통사 주석 정보를 부가함으로써, 구어의 문장 유형과 그 특징을 밝힌 것에 그 의의를 둘 수 있다.

Spoken language corpora for the nine official African languages of South Africa

In this paper we give an outline of a corpus planning project which aims to develop linguistic resources for the nine official African languages of South Africa in the form of corpora, more specifically spoken language corpora. In the course of the article, we will address issues such as spoken language vs. written language, register vs. activity and normative vs. non-normative approaches to corpus planning. We then give an outline of the design of a spoken language corpus for the nine official African languages of South Africa. We consider issues such as representativity and sampling (urban–rural, dialects, gender, social class and activities), transcription standards and conventions as well as the problems emanating from widespread loans and code switching and other forms of language mix characteristic of spoken language. Finally, we summarise the status of the project at present and plans for the future.

A method for creation and validation of a natural spoken language corpus used for prosodic and speech perception

A method for creation and validation of a natural spoken language corpus used for prosodic and speech perception

Developing a tagset and tagger for the African languages of South Africa with special reference to Xhosa

There are currently two distinct but not necessarily mutually exclusive approaches to the retrieval of information from linguistic corpora. 'Corpus-driven' approaches rely solely on the corpus itself to yield significant patterns. With the exception of orthographic spacing, no additional annotations to a 'raw' corpus are used to guide searches and the retrieval of information from the corpus. Typically, key word in context (KWIC) analyses are applied to relevant concordance lines to extract statistically significant lexical and grammatical patterns. In 'corpus-based' approaches, on the other hand, information is retrieved from an enriched corpus on the basis of annotations in the form of linguistic tags and annotations. That is, the annotations are used to direct the searches to specific grammatical and lexical phenomena in a corpus. In this article, we propose a corpus-based approach and a tagset to be used on a corpus of spoken language for the African languages of South Africa. A number of problematic linguistic phenomena such as fixed expressions, agglutination, morphemic merging and spoken language phenomena such as interrupted words etc., often have some effect on tagging principles. These problematic phenomena are discussed and illustrated. The development of the tagset is based on the morphosyntactic properties of Xhosa for reasons that are outlined in the article. Manual tagging of a large corpus would be quite a daunting and time-consuming task, not to mention the potential for various kinds of errors. This problem is solved in a two-step process. Firstly, a computer-based drag-and-drop tagger was developed to facilitate the manual tagging of a so-called training corpus. This training corpus then forms the input to the development of an automatic tagger. The principles and procedures for the development of an automatic tagger for African languages are also discussed.