Best Practices for Speech Corpora in Linguistic Research Workshop ...

annotation. Researchers have often criticized corpus
metadata models that present information only in file
headers (e.g. Archer, Culpeper & Davies, 2008). By
enabling access to metadata at the site of the tokens
retrieved, EXAKT responds to this crucial need in variation
analysis. Figure 3 illustrates a token of the word tamam
‘alright, okay’ in STC, along with a select number of
metadata categories (Metadata criteria can be selected
according to research questions.). Figure 4 displays a standoff
annotation of another token of tamam for utterance and
speech act function.
Figure 3: Token and selected conversation features
Figure 4: Utterance and speech act type
5. Transcription Standardization in STC and
STCDC
Transcription of language Varieties has been handled in two
ways in current corpora and in disciplines such as
conversation analysis and discourse analysis, namely,
Either producing dialectal, orthographic
transcription which is as close to the
pronunciation as possible, or producing a
transcription based on a written standard, but
usually allowing for some variation.
Andersen (2010: 554)
As is current practice in general corpora, STC follows the
second approach described in Andersen (2010) (see, e.g.,
BNC). Standard orthography is employed in the v-tier,
except for a limited list of words consistently pronounced in
different ways from the so-called careful pronunciation. For
instance, the word ����������� ‘lady’ is usually pronounced
with the deletion of ��e. Thus, the word is written either as
����������� or hanfendi in the v-tier depending on speaker
pronunciation (for documentation of spelling variation in
STC see Ruhi et al. (2010b) and the corpus web site for
documents on technical details). Prominently marked
dialectal and stylistic variants of words and morphological
20
realizations are transcribed in the c-tier (see Figure 5a). As
stylistic variation can interleave with dialect shifts,
representing both the actual pronunciation and its standard
form provides crucial information for investigating
pragmatic variation.
In STCDC, standardized dialectal orthography is employed
in the v-tier and standardized orthography of prominent
words is written in the c-tier. STC and STCDC
transcriptions are thus like mirror images of each other
(compare, Figures 2a,b and 5a,b).
STC and STCDC share the same transcription system
adapted from HIAT (Ruhi et al., 2010b). A major gain of
this procedure will be the possibility to compare dialectal
and standard forms in a unitary fashion across Turkey and
Northern Cyprus. STCDC will also inform standardization
in the compilation of special, dialectal computerized corpora
for Anatolian dialects, owing to the fact that dialects in
Cypriot Turkish share an extensive number of variation
patterns despite variation especially in certain inflectional
���������� ������������ ������Figures 5a and 5b illustrate
the transcription of the /t/-/d/ and /k/-/g/ variation in STCDC
and STC, respectively.
BUR000030 [v] ((0.6)) geç içeri. gel. ((laughs)) �
MUS000031 [v] �� � !
MUS000031 [c] ��
IND000002 [v] ((XXX))
[nn]
Figure 5a: Transcription of /k/-/g/ variation in STC
BUR000002 [v] �������������������������������������������
burdan yoksa
BUR000002 [c] ���������� ((lengthening))
FIK000003 [v]
FIK000003 [c]
[nn] background))
Figure 5b: Transcription of /t/-/d/ variation in STCDC
For dialectal variation studies, the transcription
methodology described above is supported through EXAKT.
The tool automatically produces word lists from the v-tier,
which can then be selected for search in the corpora. Such
searches reveal instances of variation in situ, as can be seen
in Figures 2a,b and 5a,b.
Commonality in standardization in STC and STCDC is not
restricted to solely the transcription of the word. The two
corpora also employ similar annotation conventions for
discursively significant paralinguistic features and nonlexical
contributions to the conversation (see, e.g., the
superscript dot in Figure 5a for laughter). Figure 5b
illustrates the lengthening of phonetic units in words, which
is described in the c-tier in both corpora. This methodology
is expected to ease cross-varietal pragmatic research.