Spoken Language Corpora Research Articles

Morphology of evaluation: the peculiarities of modeling evaluative meanings through morphological means in the Ukrainian language

This study examines the morphological means used to express evaluation in Ukrainian, drawing on a corpus of spoken language, literary texts, dictionaries, and internet resources. The analysis focuses on how evaluation is encoded in the morphology of nouns, pronouns, numerals, and adjectives, with particular attention to the use of augmentatives, diminutives, gender, and degrees of comparison. The findings reveal a rich and varied system for expressing subjective evaluation, including the frequent use of diminutive forms to soften negativity and the creative use of comparative and elative forms to express a high degree of intensity. The study also highlights the role of gender in shaping evaluative meanings and the tendency to use occasional and non-normative forms to achieve specific pragmatic effects. The research contributes to a deeper understanding of the relationship between language, culture, and evaluation, and provides insights into the unique ways in which Ukrainian speakers express their attitudes and emotions through morphological choices.

공간 형용사 ‘굵다’와 ‘粗’의 인지적 기제 대조 연구

In order to examine the actual usage of spatial adjectives 'Kulkda' and 'Cu' and the cognitive mechanism of their extended meanings, this study analyzed the actual combination pattern of spatial meaning and the frequency of the appearance of the extended meaning through 3000 cases in each spoken language corpus. As a result of the analysis, the spatial meaning of “Kulkda” appears with a frequency of 84%, and the extended meaning is 16%, which is mainly closely combined with the 'food' category. The spatial meaning of “Cu” has a frequency of 78%, with extended meaning that is 22%, which combines mostly with the 'human body' category. “Kulkda” has four positive meanings, one negative meaning, while “Cu” has one positive meaning, and five negative meanings. It is expected that the results of this study will contribute to related research and actual Korean language classes.

Flertalsformer af ari-ord i den færøske talesprogsbank

The aim of this article is to investigate dialectal variation of plural endings of ari-words in Faroese, i.e., masculine words with ari-ending in singular. Such words for example lærari ‘teacher’ may get different plural endings in spoken Faroese: ar, ir, a, and R (lærarar, lærarir, lærara, læraR). In the written language there is only one correct plural form which is ar: lærarar. The empirical material in this article is picked up from a corpus of spoken language, Føroyskur talumálsbanki, which is a corpus management and analysis system for annotated corpora. The article is also a study of the usability of the corpus concerning dialectal variation in spoken Faroese. The result of the correlation shows that the non-standardized ir-variant is most frequent in the corpus. Here I investigate the variation by correlating them with two non-linguistic variables, place, and age.

A multilingual corpus approach to postpredicativity in spoken Turkish, Kurmanji Kurdish and German

This paper investigates phenomena of postpredicativity in a Turkish- Kurmanji Kurdish-German trilingual corpus of spoken language. Starting from the assumption that postpredicativity when viewed in this trilingual perspective is an epiphenomenal effect of argument type in Kurmanji, finite verb movement in German and discourse activation status (next to illocutionarily motivated verb fronting) in Turkish, it sets out to explore overlaps and double motivations. Based on a collection of 1,211 findings, differentiations within the categories as well as overlaps at several levels are identified. Central results are discourse-level motivations in Kurmanji, their dependence on syntactic size, and overlaps between illocutional verb fronting and discourse activation status in Turkish.

Towards Continuous Quality Control for Spoken Language Corpora


 This paper describes the development of a systematic approach to the creation, management and curation of linguistic resources, particularly spoken language corpora. It also presents first steps towards a framework for continuous quality control to be used within external research projects by non-technical users, and discuss various domain and discipline specific problems and individual solutions. The creation of spoken language corpora is not only a time-consuming and costly process, but the created resources often represent intangible cultural heritage, containing recordings of, for example, extinct languages or historical events. Since high quality resources are needed to enable re-use in as many future contexts as possible, researchers need to be provided with the necessary means for quality control. We believe that this includes methods and tools adapted to Humanities researchers as non-technical users, and that these methods and tools need to be developed to support existing tasks and goals of research projects.

Corpus lingüísticos de habla infantil y representatividad: el valor de los datos en repertorios de habla en desarrollo

Este trabajo destaca la importancia de la composición sobre la cantidad en los inventarios de datos de habla infantil. Las garantías de representatividad exigidas a catálogos de muestras verbales suelen ceñirse a la dimensión cuantitativa, de modo que las propiedades cualitativas ligadas a la naturaleza del propio repertorio no siempre parecen bien definidas y, de manera particular, apenas se contemplan en fuentes de habla en desarrollo. Nuestra contribución, de orden teórico-metodológico, justifica la necesidad de atribuir relevancia a las muestras de habla infantil sobre criterios cualitativos que alcanzan a características genuinas de la lengua-en-proceso. El lenguaje de los niños no está suficientemente documentado, así que antes que “corpus de referencia” con garantías de representatividad cuantitativa, los inventarios de habla infantil sustentan su valor en el significado de las muestras por sus propiedades idiosincrásicas. En concreto, defendemos tres dimensiones requeridas para la pertinencia de los datos en un corpus de adquisición de la lengua: (a) que contengan registros evolutivos de datos longitudinales; (b) que incluyan variables de contexto idiomático y de entorno habitual que canalizan el input; y (c) que se trate de compilaciones densas de muestras, o de compilaciones con diversidad de sujetos, para que en todo caso revelen los patrones interesantes y no solo los frecuentes.

Providing Digital Infrastructure for Audio-Visual Linguistic Research Data with Diverse Usage Scenarios: Lessons Learnt

This article describes the development of the digital infrastructure at a research data centre for audio-visual linguistic research data, the Hamburg Centre for Language Corpora (HZSK) at the University of Hamburg in Germany, over the past ten years. The typical resource hosted in the HZSK Repository, the core component of the infrastructure, is a collection of recordings with time-aligned transcripts and additional contextual data, a spoken language corpus. Since the centre has a thematic focus on multilingualism and linguistic diversity and provides its service to researchers within linguistics and other disciplines, the development of the infrastructure was driven by diverse usage scenarios and user needs on the one hand, and by the common technical requirements for certified service centres of the CLARIN infrastructure on the other. Beyond the technical details, the article also aims to be a contribution to the discussion on responsibilities and services within emerging digital research data infrastructures and the fundamental issues in sustainability of research software engineering, concluding that in order to truly cater to user needs across the research data lifecycle, we still need to bridge the gap between discipline-specific research methods in the process of digitalisation and generic digital research data management approaches.

Correlation between expressiveness and syntactic independence of Russian onomatopoeic verbal interjections

This article considers Russian onomatopoeic verbal interjections due to the fact that these linguistic units possess a unique grammatical feature of being either completely syntactically independent or act as members of sentence, depending on the context and speaker’s communicative intention. Moreover, there is ambiguity concerning their expressiveness. In some cases they are prosodically foregrounded and have reduplicated morphemes, in others no pauses in speech separate them from the host construction and no expressive morphology is demonstrated. This research aims at establishing correlation between prosodic/morphological expressiveness and syntactic independence of Russian onomatopoeic verbal interjections with the help of a statistical model. Firstly, corpus analysis of data from the Russian Corpus of Spoken Language is applied examine expressiveness of these linguistic units, as well as to investigate their syntactic independence. Finally, a Log-Linear Statistical Model is applied to establish dependencies between absence/presence of these three features and to determine which ones of them have significant correlations.

Desafíos y reflexiones sobre utilización de corpus libres: El caso de PRESEEA en el estudio de la reformulación

Our main purpose is to present our experience working on a free spoken-language corpus in Spanish. As part of my doctoral thesis project, concerned with rephrasing used in spoken interaction, I decided to study this phenomenon by analyzing the data available in the PRESEEA corpus. In order to annotate a part of this corpus, we created a TextGrid file on PRAAT associated with each audio file. Then, we imported those files onto ELAN to start the annotation process, with categories related to five language levels relevant for our research: prosodic, syntactic, macrosyntactic, interactional and rephrasing phenomena. In addition to sharing our methodological work experience, we would like to emphasize the importance of free spoken corpora for the development of the research in linguistics.

Existentials and possessives in Modern Hebrew

AbstractThis paper considers the relationship between synchronic variation and language change in the context of the existential and possessive constructions in Modern Hebrew, which exhibit a normative – colloquial alternation. The study examines usage patterns across age groups and time periods, as represented in spoken-language corpora. It shows that the non-normative construction is used extensively in the contemporary speech of adults. Moreover, a comparison of the use of the normative – colloquial alternations by two populations, children and adults, in different time periods, provides evidence to suggest that these constructions are undergoing language change. A cross-linguistic perspective lends additional support: across languages the expression of existence involves non-canonical structures, which are particularly susceptible to language variation and, possibly, language change.

‘정말’, ‘진짜’의 담화 기능과 운율 특성

The aim of this study is to investigate the functions and prosodic features of ‘joengmal’ and ‘jinjja’ in spoken language corpus(TV drama speech corpus). ‘Joengmal’ and ‘jinjja’ have the meaning of ‘truth without falsehood’ realized as nouns or adverbs, and also realized with a discourse markers with a discourse functions. Functions of discourse markers ‘joengmal’ and ‘jinjja’ are ‘emphasis(with speaker’s negative manner)’, ‘gap-filler’. Unlike nouns and adverbs, discourse markers that performs these functions have salient prosodic features in the position in utterance, prosidic boundary, tonal patterns, duration, pause and F0 difference between the minimum value and the maximum value in end syllable.

Usage-based linguistics and the magic number four

AbstractMiller’s (1956, The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information.Psychological Review63(2). 81–97) working memory (WM) capacity of around seven items, plus or minus two, was never found by usage-based linguists to be a recurrent pattern in language. Thus, it has not figured prominently in cognitive models of grammar. Upon reflection, this is somewhat unusual, since WM has been considered a fundamental cognitive domain for information processing in psychology, so one might have reasonably expected properties such as capacity constraints to be reflected in language use and structures derived from use. This paper proposes that Miller’s (1956) number has not been particularly productive in usage-based linguistics because it turns out to have been an overestimate. A revised WM capacity has now superseded it within cognitive science, a “magic number four plus or minus one” (Cowan 2001, The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity.Behavioral and Brain Sciences24(1). 87–185). This paper suggests, drawing on evidence from spoken language corpora and multiple languages, that a range of linguistic structures and patterns align with this revised capacity estimate, unlike Miller’s (1956), ranging from phrasal verbs, idioms, n-grams, the lengths of intonation units and some abstract grammatical properties of phrasal categories and clause structure.

A Basic Research to Develope the dialogue act tag set for Korean language learner’s spoken language corpus: tagging on the Korean natives’ and foreigners’ dialogue act

A Basic Research to Develope the dialogue act tag set for Korean language learner’s spoken language corpus: tagging on the Korean natives’ and foreigners’ dialogue act

The distribution and function change of ‘yo’ appeared in 20th century spoken language corpus

This study aims at researching the change of ‘yo’ in terms of distribution and function through investigating the distribution and function of ‘yo’ appeared in 20 th century spoken language corpus. The data of this study are Korea University spoken language corpus and with these data we researched ‘yo’ quantitatively as well as qualitatively. As a result of the study, we identified that the use of ‘yo’ was spreaded in the latter part of 20 th century and this spread was related with the spread of ‘haeyo’ style. Also the most influential register classification criterion of ‘yo’ use variation is ‘one way or two way’ criterion and in two way registers the various uses of ‘yo’ were more appeared. In one way registers, ‘yo’ appeared productively in 1960s and in this case ‘yo’ functioned as the realization of ‘haeyo’ style and the delimit of the intonation unit. In two way registers, ‘yo’ appeared productively in the latter of 1950s and in this case ‘yo’ functioned as the anaphor of the predicative phrase. Of the two way data, the registers of the distinguishing ‘yo’ realization are the general formal two way register and the special formal two way register. Especially the special formal two way register as debate rarely used ‘yo’. This study is meaningful in the way that the distribution and the function of ‘yo’ are empirically investigated with 20 th century spoken language corpus. But as this study treats a wide range, more detailed studies are needed.

Transcription and Annotation of a Corpus of Spoken Language in North Korean

Transcription and Annotation of a Corpus of Spoken Language in North Korean

Changes in the aspects of the ‘Yeobo’ class in the spoken language corpus of the 20th century

Changes in the aspects of the ‘Yeobo’ class in the spoken language corpus of the 20th century

Prosodia y polifuncionalidad de los marcadores anda, vamos, vaya y venga

The present study examines the prosodic configuration of markers derived from verbs of movement (anda, vamos, vaya and venga). First of all, the prosodic behaviour of all four markers will be studied. Secondly, the study aims to find outwhether the pragmatic functions of the markers can be linked to their prosodic configuration. For this purpose, various suprasegmental parameters and the functions of the markers anda, vamos, vaya andvengaare analyzed in a corpus of spoken language. Through statistical tests, the relations between the prosodic and the functional parameters are verified as well as the strength of these associations. This quantitative and qualitative prosodic analysis stresses the importance of prosody for the study of discourse markers.

Populating a 3D virtual learning environment for interpreting students with bilingual dialogues to support situated learning in an institutional context

The point of departure of this article is an immersive (avatar-based) 3D virtual environment which was developed in the European project IVY – Interpreting in Virtual Reality – to simulate interpreting practice. Whilst this environment is the first 3D environment dedicated to interpreter-mediated communication, research in other educational contexts suggests that such environments can foster learning. The IVY 3D environment offers a range of virtual ‘locations’ (e.g. business meeting room, tourist office, doctor’s surgery) which serve as backdrops for the practice of consecutive and dialogue interpreting in business and public service contexts. The locations are populated with relevant objects and with robot-avatars who act as speakers by presenting recorded monologues and bilingual dialogues. Students, represented by their own avatars, join them to practise interpreting. This article focuses on the development of the bilingual dialogues, which are at the heart of many interpreter-mediated business and public service encounters but which are notoriously difficult to obtain for educational purposes. Given that interpreter training institutions usually need to offer bilingual resources of comparable difficulty levels in many language combinations, ad hoc approaches to the creation of such materials are normally ruled out. The approach outlined here was therefore to start from available corpora of spoken language that were designed with pedagogical applications in mind. The article begins by explaining how the dialogues were created and then discusses the benefits and potential shortcomings of this approach in the context of interpreter education. The main points of discussion concern (1) the level of systematicity and authenticity that can be achieved with this corpus-based approach; and (2) the potential of a 3D virtual environment to increase this sense of authenticity and thus to enable students to experience the essence of dialogue interpreting in a simulated environment.

The HZSK Repository: Implementation, Features, and Use Cases of a Repository for Spoken Language Corpora

This article describes the process of the conception and implementation of a digital repository which is based on the software framework Fedora, Islandora, and Drupal. The main data type that is to be organized, maintained, and distributed with the repository is spoken language corpora, with a focus on multilingualism, which means that the content of the repository may be of special interest to researchers of linguistic, translational and socio-psychological studies. We concentrate on the technical requirements that had to be fulfilled with regard to our status as an official center of the Common Language Resource Infrastructure Network (CLARIN), a pan-European initiative in the context of the Digital Humanities. In particular, the requirements include preparation of information for the description of resources providing a source for metadata harvesting, registration of persistent identifiers for the long-term access and citeability of resources, implementation of a federated content search module, dealing with privacy restrictions, and the possibility to provide a single sign-on method via Shibboleth. The HZSK Repository ultimately passed two assessment processes: the assessment of the Data Seal of Approval, and a CLARIN-internal assessment procedure.

The Distribution of The Ending Class ‘-nja’ -Focused on Corpus of Spoken Language-

The Distribution of The Ending Class ‘-nja’ -Focused on Corpus of Spoken Language-