Work on Spoken (Multimodal) Language Corpora in South Africa

• This paper describes past, ongoing and planned work on the collection and transcription of spoken language samples for all the South African official languages and as part of this the training of researchers in corpus linguistic research skills. More specifically the work has involved (and still involves) establishing an international corpus linguistic network linked to a network hub at a UNISA website and the development of research tools, a corpus research guide and workbook for multimodal communication and spoken language corpus research. As an example of the work we are doing and hope to do more of in the future, we present a small pilot study of the influence of English and Afrikaans on the 100 most frequent words in spoken Xhosa as this is evidenced in the corpus of spoken interaction we have gathered so far. Other planned work, besides work on spoken language phenomena, involves comparison of spoken and written language and work on communicative body movements (gestures) and their relation to speech.

Ämnesord

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Språkteknologi (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Language Technology (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Language Studies and Linguistics (hsv//eng)

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Systemvetenskap, informationssystem och informatik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Information Systems (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

multimodal corpora

south african languages

spoken language

xhosa

zulu

Linguistics

Informatics

Publikations- och innehållstyp

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