OLAC Record oai:scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu:10125/74660

Metadata
Title:		Universals of reference in discourse and grammar: Evidence from the Multi-CAST collection of spoken corpora
Bibliographic Citation:		Haig, Geoffrey, Schnell, Stefan, Schiborr, Nils Norman; 2021; Kaipuleohone University of Hawai'i Digital Language Archive;http://hdl.handle.net/10125/74660.
Creator:		Haig, Geoffrey
		Schnell, Stefan
		Schiborr, Nils Norman
Date (W3CDTF):		2021
Description:		Data from under-researched languages are now available in sufficient quantity and quality to feed into corpus-based approaches to language typology. In this paper we present Multi-CAST (Multilingual Corpus of Annotated Spoken Texts), a project designed to facilitate cross-linguistic comparison of naturalistic discourse across typologically diverse languages, which implements a purpose-built shared annotation scheme. After sketching the rationale and architecture of Multi-CAST, we illustrate the efficacy of the method with two case-studies: The first one investigates the rates of lexical (as opposed to pronominal and zero) realization of arguments in discourse across a sample of 15 typologically diverse languages. Our results reveal a remarkable and hitherto unnoticed uniformity in the density of lexical references, despite the lack of content control in the corpora. The second addresses the question of whether cross-linguistically attested regularities in morphosyntax can meaningfully be related to frequency effects in discourse. We find some support for frequency-based explanations, but our data also show that the frequency accounts leave several key questions unanswered. Overall, our findings underscore that research based on language documentation-derived corpus data, and in particular spoken language data, is not only possible, but in fact crucially necessary for testing frequency-based explanations, because these data stem from spoken language and typologically diverse languages. We also identify a number of epistemological and methodological shortcomings with our approach, and discuss some of the requirements for further innovation in areas of corpus building, corpus annotation, and typological comparability.
Identifier:		Haig, Geoffrey & Schnell, Stefan & Schiborr, Nils N. 2021. Universals of reference in discourse and grammar: Evidence from the Multi-CAST collection of spoken corpora. In Haig, Geoffrey & Schnell, Stefan & Seifart, Frank (eds.), Doing corpus-based typology with spoken language data: State of the art, 141–177. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai'i Press.
		978-0-9979673-0-2
Identifier (URI):		http://hdl.handle.net/10125/74660
Publisher:		University of Hawai'i Press
Relation:		LD&C Special Publication
Rights:		Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike Licence
Subject:		corpus-based typology
		universals of language use
		discourse structure
		referential choice
		marking asymmetries
Table Of Contents:		LD&C-SP25__5_Haig+Schnell+Schiborr.pdf
OLAC Info
Archive:		Language Documentation and Conservation
Description:		http://www.language-archives.org/archive/ldc.scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu
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OaiIdentifier:		oai:scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu:10125/74660
DateStamp:		2024-09-02
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Citation:		Haig, Geoffrey; Schnell, Stefan; Schiborr, Nils Norman. 2021. University of Hawai'i Press.