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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-GB link=blue vlink=purple><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal>Hi Mike, John and others following this thread<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>I have followed much of the previous discussion – but felt less qualified to comment <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>while it seemed to be more concerned with linguistic definitions of diglossia.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Here are my initial thoughts:<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>a) all written languages are diglossic to some extent, i.e. display some differences between the two <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>major modes (speech and writing), with a spectrum of sub-modes in between (e.g. written-to-be-spoken, <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>for example a political speech, where there will be differences between what was written and what <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>was spoken, as well as the additional delivery components – stress, pronunciation, pauses, deviations <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>from script, etc; and spoken-to-be-written, for example dictated letters/memos/news reportage, etc <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>where again there will be differences in the resulting written text). EAGLES, TEI, Cobuild, BNC, and others <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>have discussed problems of text-types/genres in this spectrum. Computer-mediated communication has <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>generated many new genres (with features closer in many respects to spoken language) which are being <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>discussed and categorised more recently.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>b) recordings of speech can contain various problems, such as surrounding noises, multiple speakers, etc<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>just as historical manuscripts may contain smudges and stains, handwriting issues, etc<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>c) the audio data corpus may be searchable by sounds (I’m not sure if this has been implemented yet, as I am not<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>a specialist in this area, but if not, I’m sure it will be: segment the audio data, and use voice-recognition to accept<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>the sound to be searched), or by phonetic symbols (if it has been phonetically transcribed; e.g. search for /yu:z/<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>to find instances of ‘youse’), but the user would have to disambiguate ‘youse’ from other occurrences of this sound,<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>e.g. in ‘what he’s told *<b><u>you’s</u></b><u>*</u> of no importance to me’, or more likely ‘use’, which may be very numerous?<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>d) the same problems occur with text transcriptions of speech: whichever set of transcription conventions you use,<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>it will be extremely difficult to capture all the variations in the oral delivery. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>e) but the biggest problem is that, the more variations you transcribe, in greater detail and with greater accuracy, the more difficult<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>it will be for the user to find all the occurrences of an “item” (indeed, it requires us to re-define “item”); indexation for retrieval<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>becomes a non-trivial task.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>f) This became apparent early on with lemmatization of modern data at Cobuild . <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>g) I encountered it again more forcefully when working with historical data, as in the Dictionary of TRADED GOODS & COMMODITIES <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>1550-1800 project at Wolverhampton University. There were so many spelling variations of each “item”, that it became difficult to be <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>sure that one had retrieved all instances of that “item”… even alphabetized frequency lists were not much use, if variation was in the <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>first letter (enuff, inough, etc). One needed a whole range of tools, plus major investment of time and linguistic expertise in the manual <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>scrutiny of outputs…<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>h) In GeWiss, a current research project on Spoken Academic Discourse funded by the Volkswagen Foundation,<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>(<a href="http://www1.aston.ac.uk/lss/research/research-projects/gewiss-spoken-academic-discourse/">http://www1.aston.ac.uk/lss/research/research-projects/gewiss-spoken-academic-discourse/</a>)<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>we are therefore transcribing in several ‘tiers’: (i) the ‘normalised spelling’ tier, which includes established written spellings<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>for some pronunciation variations – this will allow us to search for all instances of ‘want to’, including the established ‘wanna’, <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>however it may have been pronounced on a particular occasion (ii) a ‘comment’ tier, where transcribers can describe the exact <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>nature of the variation in as much detail as they have time to do – this will allow us to add ‘wannoo’ or ‘wannae’ to the retrievable <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>instances of ‘want to’, if that is how it is pronounced in particular cases, and if a researcher is interested in such variations<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>(iii) other tiers are available – e.g. for translation of items from other languages in bilingual/multilingual speech, which is an increasing<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>phenomenon in modern times, or for editorial comments about subsequent modifications to information in any of the tiers<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Best<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Ramesh<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>Ramesh Krishnamurthy<br>Lecturer in English Studies, School of Languages and Social Sciences,<br>Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK<br>Tel: +44 (0)121-204-3812 ; Fax: +44 (0)121-204-3766 [Room NX08, 10th<br>Floor, North Wing of Main Building]<br><a href="http://www1.aston.ac.uk/lss/staff/krishnamurthyr/"><span style='color:blue'>http://www1.aston.ac.uk/lss/staff/krishnamurthyr/</span></a><br>Director, ACORN (Aston Corpus Network project): <a href="http://acorn.aston.ac.uk/"><span style='color:blue'>http://acorn.aston.ac.uk/</span></a> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>---<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoPlainText>Message: 4<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2010 12:45:51 -0500<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>From: Mike Maxwell <<a href="mailto:maxwell@umiacs.umd.edu">maxwell@umiacs.umd.edu</a>><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Linguistics, corpus linguistics, and<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText> diglossia<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>To: "Angus B. Grieve-Smith" <<a href="mailto:grvsmth@panix.com">grvsmth@panix.com</a>><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>Cc: <a href="mailto:corpora@uib.no">corpora@uib.no</a><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>On 12/15/2010 8:35 PM, Angus B. Grieve-Smith wrote:<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>> As I'm sure you're aware, corpus linguistics is fine; it's just that <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>> you need a corpus that's representative of what you're studying.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>Ay, there's the rub. What do you do when the corpora don't exist, because people have been educated not to write the way they talk?<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>I'm sure corpus linguists have pondered this. How do they study things like "ain't", "y'all", "youse", "youse-uns", "might could", and other non-standard constructions? Large scale transcription of spoken English? (And English is barely diglossic, compared with languages like Arabic or Tamil.)<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>-- <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText> Mike Maxwell<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>---<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>Message: 5<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2010 13:30:54 -0500<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>From: "John F. Sowa" <<a href="mailto:sowa@bestweb.net">sowa@bestweb.net</a>><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Linguistics, corpus linguistics, and<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText> diglossia<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>To: <a href="mailto:corpora@uib.no">corpora@uib.no</a><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>On 12/17/2010 12:45 PM, Mike Maxwell wrote:<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>> I'm sure corpus linguists have pondered this. How do they study <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>> things like "ain't", "y'all", "youse", "youse-uns", "might could", and <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>> other non-standard constructions?<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>A friend of mine, who was analyzing Hawaiian Creole, asked one of her students to put a tape recorder under the kitchen table at home.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>In interviews, the native creole speakers would always "correct themselves", but they only spoke freely after they forgot that the recorder was running.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>John Sowa<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>---<o:p></o:p></p></div></body></html>