1st Edition

Spoken Corpus Linguistics From Monomodal to Multimodal

By Svenja Adolphs, Ronald Carter Copyright 2013
    206 Pages 19 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    216 Pages 19 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    In this book, Adolphs and Carter explore key approaches to work in spoken corpus linguistics. The book discusses some of the pioneering challenges faced in designing, building and utilising insights from the analysis of spoken corpora, arguing that, even though writing is heavily privileged in corpus research, the spoken language can reveal patterns of language use that are both different and distinctive and that this has important implications for the way in which language is described, for the study of human communication and for the field of applied linguistics as a whole.

    Spoken Corpus Linguistics is divided into two main parts. The first part sets the scene by discussing traditional and new approaches to monomodal spoken corpus analysis, with a focus on discourse organisation and conversational interaction and with particular attention to forms of language such as discourse markers and multi-word units, areas of language not conventionally described but which are argued to be of importance to spoken language description and to spoken language learning and teaching research within the field of applied linguistics. The second part of the book moves into the multimodal domain and focuses on alignments between language and gesture in a spoken corpus, with particular reference to gestural movements of the head and the hand and to the different ways in which prosody might be used to enhance communication. A brief final chapter discusses new developments in the area of spoken corpus research, including the relationship between language and context, emerging research methods as well as discussing possible shifts in scope and emphasis in spoken corpus research in the future.

    Introduction Part 1: Monomodal Spoken Corpus Analysis 1. Making a start: Building and Analyzing a spoken corpus 2.Corpus and spoken interaction: Multi-word units in spoken English  3. From concordance to discourse: responses to speakers  4. Case Studies in applied spoken corpus linguistics Part 2: Multimodal Spoken Corpus Analysis 5. Sound evidence: prosody and spoken corpora 6. Moving Beyond the Text 7. Developing a framework for analysing 'headtalk' and 'handtalk': First Steps  8. Future Directions

    Biography

    Svenja Adolphs is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Nottingham.

    Ronald Carter is Professor of Modern English Language at the University of Nottingham.

    'The main achievement of the book is to put the development and exploitation of multimodal spoken corpora that integrate and align various data streams more explicitly on the agenda of corpus linguistics, at the same time discussing some of the complex technological challenges that corpus linguists will face in the future.' - Marcus Callies, Universität Bremen, Journal of Pragmatics

    "Overall, the book offers a significant representation of corpus work carried out on spoken discourse with a focus on discourse organization and MWUs, while at the same time tracing the development of spoken corpora towards multimodality and inclusion of rich contextual data. The volume will be essential reading for scholars undertaking research in multimodal corpora, but it will be relevant to anyone with an interest in variational pragmatics for the picuture it offers of existing resources and present challenges." - Marina Bondi, Universita di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Language and Dialogue 5:3