The role of language documentation in corpus-based typology
Faculty/Professorship: | General Linguistics |
Author(s): | Schnell, Stefan; Haig, Geoffrey ![]() |
Title of the Journal: | Language documentation and conservation : LD&C |
ISSN: | 1934-5275 |
Publisher Information: | Honolulu : University of Hawai’i Press |
Year of publication: | 2021 |
Issue: | SP25: Doing Corpus-Based Typology With Spoken Language Corpora: State of the art |
Pages: | 1-28 |
Language(s): | English |
Abstract: | 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. |
GND Keywords: | Korpus, Linguistik; Kontrastive Linguistik; Sprachtypologie |
Keywords: | corpus-based typology, universals of language use, discourse structure, referential choice, marking asymmetries |
DDC Classification: | 400 Language & linguistics |
RVK Classification: | ES 900 |
Peer Reviewed: | Ja |
International Distribution: | Ja |
Type: | Article |
URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10125/74656 https://fis.uni-bamberg.de/handle/uniba/57348 |
Release Date: | 19. December 2022 |

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University of Bamberg
University of Bamberg