What is it about?
This article illustrates the use of spoken corpora for a contrastive study of casual conversation in English and Spanish. It models an eclectic methodology for cross-linguistic comparison at the level of discourse, specifically of exchange structures, by drawing upon analytic resources from corpus linguistics (CL), conversation analysis (CA) and discourse analysis (DA). This combination of perspectives presents challenges and limitations which will be discussed and exemplified through a case study that explores agreement and disagreement sequences. English data have been retrieved from the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (SBCSAE; cf. Du Bois et al. 2000, 2003) and Spanish data from Corpus Oral de Referencia del Español Contemporáneo (CORLEC). The case study reveals the need for spoken corpora to include complete conversations, discourse annotation, sound files and detailed contextual information. This means a step forward from corpora of spoken language to discourse corpora and a challenge for CL, CA and DA in the near future. Keywords: conversation analysis, corpus annotation, discourse analysis, spoken corpora DOI: 10.1075/ijcl.16.3.04san In: Farr, Fiona and Anne O'Keeffe (eds.) (2011). Applying Corpus Linguistics. Special issue of International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 16:3. (pp. 345–370)
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Why is it important?
One of the first in the tradition which has come to be known as corpus assisted discourse studies (CADS), moving between quantitative/statistical analyses of large sets of data to close reading of individual texts or text-segments
Perspectives
After investing a year in the recording and transcription of Spanish conversations for Corpus Oral de Referencia del Español Contemporáneo (CORLEC) and contributing to it with nearly 400,000 words, I was ready to invest as much time and effort as necessary in the search for a corpus that was comparable and suitable for contrastive analysis. Once I found SBCSAE I knew that was the corpus I was looking for. This article presents results after analysis of this happy match between these two corpora.
Professor Carmen Santamaría
University of Alcalá
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This page is a summary of: Bricolage assembling, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, October 2011, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/ijcl.16.3.04san.
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