Corpus Of Conversational Data Research Articles

Noun phrases in Kwéyòl Donmnik

Abstract Though Creole nominal systems have been intensely researched, in-context, corpus-based examinations are uncommon, and there are Creole languages whose noun phrases remain understudied. I use a corpus of conversational data and a pattern-building task designed to elicit demonstrative and definite noun phrases, exophoric reference, and co-speech pointing gestures to explore the noun phrase in Kwéyòl Donmnik, an endangered, understudied French lexifier Creole. I focus on noun phrases that are bare, marked by the post-nominal determiners definite la ‘the’ or demonstrative sa-la ‘this/that’, or accompanied by the pre-nominal indefinite determiner yon ‘a(n)’. Results pinpoint the readings conveyed by each noun phrase type, identify the word categories of their nouns, and address similarities in usage between definite la and demonstrative sa-la.

Mock politeness and culture: Perceptions and practice in UK and Italian data

AbstractThis paper investigates the extent to which perceptions of cultural variation correspond to actual practice with reference to (national) cultures in Britain and Italy. More specifically, the aspect of im/politeness that is addressed is mock politeness, a subset of implicational impoliteness that is triggered by an im/politeness mismatch. In the first phase of the study, two sets of comparable corpora are employed to investigate perceptions of mock politeness (using search terms such assarcasticandpatronizing) in relation to cultural identities. The first pair of corpora is composed of national newspapers in England and Italy, collected in 2014, and the second set are web corpora. What emerges from this stage is a strong tendency for both the English and Italian corpora to associate (potential) mock polite behaviors such as beingironicwith a British cultural identity.In the second stage of the study, I use a corpus of conversational data from British English and Italian online discussion forums, in which mock polite behaviors have been identified and annotated, in order to investigate whether there is any evidence for the cultural assumptions found in the first phase. As will be shown, the analysis reveals both variation in cultural practice and a significant gap between perceptions and practice.In describing and identifying this gap between perceptions and practice, I show both how (anglocentric) academic description has underestimated cultural variation, and, in contrast, how cultural variation is overestimated in lay description.

Metacommunication, Social Pretend Play and Children with Autism

THIS ARTICLE INVESTIGATES PROCESSES of engagement in social pretend play between children with autism (age range 3.6 to 7.2 years) and adult play partners, using a large corpus of conversational data. We take a qualitative discourse analytic approach to investigate the metacommunicative strategies used by the children. Our initial framework for exploring these issues is Giffin's (1984) model of verbal and nonverbal metacommunication in sociodramatic pretend play, and we develop this model further by proposing a cline of engagement along which we situate the children in our study. We found that, while all the children do participate in pretend play, and engage with the adult play partners to at least some extent, the children vary in the range of metacommunicative strategies they use, and in the degree to which they negotiate the creation of play sequences with their interlocutor. Furthermore, even for the most competent children, the metacommunication exhibits atypical characteristics.