The pragmatic annotation of a corpus of academic lectures

Siân Alsop, Hilary Nesi


Abstract
This paper will describe a process of ‘pragmatic annotation’ (c.f. Simpson-Vlach and Leicher 2006) which systematically identifies pragmatic meaning in spoken text. The annotation of stretches of text that perform particular pragmatic functions allows conclusions to be drawn across data sets at a different level than that of the individual lexical item, or structural content. The annotation of linguistic features, which cannot be identified by purely objective means, is distinguished here from structural mark-up of speaker identity, turns, pauses etc. The features annotated are ‘explaining’, ‘housekeeping’, ‘humour’, ‘storytelling’ and ‘summarising’. Twenty-two subcategories are attributed to these elements. Data is from the Engineering Lecture Corpus (ELC), which includes 76 English-medium engineering lectures from the UK, New Zealand and Malaysia. The annotation allows us to compare differences in the use of these discourse features across cultural subcorpora. Results show that cultural context does impact on the linguistic realisation of commonly occurring discourse features in engineering lectures.
Anthology ID:
L14-1287
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
Month:
May
Year:
2014
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Hrafn Loftsson, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
1560–1563
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/323_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Siân Alsop and Hilary Nesi. 2014. The pragmatic annotation of a corpus of academic lectures. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), pages 1560–1563, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
The pragmatic annotation of a corpus of academic lectures (Alsop & Nesi, LREC 2014)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/323_Paper.pdf