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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 |
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Archive: | Language Documentation and Conservation | |
Description: | http://www.language-archives.org/archive/ldc.scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu | |
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OAI Info |
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OaiIdentifier: | oai:scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu:10125/74660 | |
DateStamp: | 2024-09-02 | |
GetRecord: | OAI-PMH request for simple DC format | |
Search Info | ||
Citation: | Haig, Geoffrey; Schnell, Stefan; Schiborr, Nils Norman. 2021. University of Hawai'i Press. |