In the process of compiling a new corpus of contemporary spoken British English, the London–Lund Corpus 2, we hit upon a construction used in the conversations recorded that had not previously been dealt with in the literature, namely the reactive what-x construction. Prompted by this discovery, we carried out a detailed analysis of its properties and constraints within the broad framework of Cognitive Linguistics, namely Construction Grammar, and found that the reactive what-x construction features the interrogative what directly followed by a phrasal or clausal complement x. Moreover, what forms one tone unit with the complement and never carries a nuclear pitch accent. The core meaning is to signal an immediate reaction to something said by another speaker in the preceding turn, and the dialogic functions include questions proper as well as expressions of disagreement. The two contributions of this study are: (i) to provide a definition of the reactive what-x construction and (ii) to propose a crucial theoretical extension of Construction Grammar involving a broadening of the concept of construction to cover not only the lexical–semantic pairing but also prosodic properties and the role of the construction in the interactive dialogic space in speech.
This study examines the dialogic functions of expansion and contraction of first-person epistemic and evidential Complement-Taking Predicate (CTP) constructions, such as I think complement, I suppose complement and I know complement, in spoken discourse. It combines corpus and experimental methods (i) to investigate whether CTP constructions are used to open up the dialogic space for new ideas or counterarguments, or to fend off alternative views, and (ii) to identify what contextual factors play a role in determining the dialogic force of the constructions. First, an exploratory analysis of CTP constructions in the London–Lund Corpus (LLC) of spoken British English is carried out with the aim to identify important contextual factors and generate hypotheses about their dialogic effects. Then, a laboratory experiment is conducted to test the impact of the three most prominent factors for speakers' interpretations of utterances containing CTPs. The results indicate that CTP constructions do not only serve to expand the dialogic context in which they occur, but also to restrict alternative views. Interlocutor status, the co-occurrence of other stance markers and prosodic marking of first-person CTP are shown to have a significant effect on the dialogic function of the expressions. These findings call into question some claims in appraisal theory about the role of CTP constructions in discourse, and highlight the need for a flexible approach to the analysis of these poly-functional stance expressions.
This article describes and critically examines the challenging task of compiling The London–Lund Corpus 2 (LLC–2) from start to end, accounting for the methodological decisions made in each stage and highlighting the innovations. LLC–2 is a half-a-million-word corpus of contemporary spoken British English with recordings from 2014 to 2019. Its size and design are the same as those of the world's first machine-readable spoken corpus, The London–Lund Corpus of Spoken English with data from the 1950s to 1980s. In this way, LLC–2 allows not only for synchronic investigations of contemporary speech but also for principled diachronic research of spoken language across time. Each stage of the compilation of LLC–2 posed its own challenges, ranging from the design of the corpus, the recruitment of the speakers, transcription, markup and annotation procedures, to the release of the corpus to the international research community. The decisions and solutions represent state-of-the-art practices of spoken corpus compilation with important innovations that enhance the value of LLC–2 for spoken corpus research, such as the availability of both the transcriptions and the corresponding time-aligned audio files in a standard compliant format.
This article aims to describe key challenges of preparing and releasing audio material for spoken data and to propose solutions to these challenges. We draw on our experience of compiling the new London-Lund Corpus 2 (LLC-2), where transcripts are released together with the audio files. However, making the audio material publicly available required careful consideration of how to, most effectively, 1) align the transcripts with the audio and 2) anonymise personal information in the recordings. First, audio-to-text alignment was solved through the insertion of timestamps in front of speaker turns in the transcription stage, which, as we show in the article, may later be used as a valuable complement to more robust automatic segmentation. Second, anonymisation was done by means of a Praat script, which replaced all personal information with a sound that made the lexical information incomprehensible but retained the prosodic characteristics. The public release of the LLC-2 audio material is a valuable feature of the corpus that allows users to extend the corpus data relative to their own research interests and, thus, broaden the scope of corpus linguistics. To illustrate this, we present three studies that have successfully used the LLC-2 audio material.
This Element is a contribution to a new generation of corpus pragmatics research by taking as its starting point the multifaceted nature of speech acts in conversation, and by adopting a mixed-methods approach. Through a unique combination of theoretical, qualitative, quantitative, and statistical approaches, it provides a detailed investigation of advice-giving and advice uptake in relation to (i) the range of constructions used to give advice in different discourse contexts and at different points in time, and (ii) their interaction with dialogic and social factors of advice uptake as key components of frames of advice exchanges in natural conversation. Using data from the London-Lund Corpora of spoken British English, the Element shows, firstly, that there are systematic differences in advising between discourse contexts over the past half a century, and, secondly, that who gave the advice and how they did it are the strongest predictors of the advisee's response. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Dialogic resonance, when speakers reproduce constructions from prior turns, is a compelling type of coordination in everyday conversation. This study takes its starting point in resonance in stance-taking sequences with the aim to account for the interplay between intersubjective motivations and cognitive facilitation in resonance production. It analyzes stance-taking sequences in the London–Lund Corpus 2, determining (i) the type of stance alignment (agreement or disagreement), and (ii) the time lapse between the stance-taking turns. The main findings are, firstly, that resonance is more likely than non-resonance to be used by speakers who express disagreement than agreement, which we interpret as a mitigating function of resonance, and, secondly, that the turn transitions are faster in resonating sequences due to cognitive activation in the prior turn. We propose that the face-saving intersubjective motivation of resonance combines with its facilitating cognitive effect to promote appeasing communication.
The idea of this special issue on Spoken language in time and across time emerged at an international symposium on this topic that we organised at Lund University on 20 September 2019. The purpose of the symposium was to celebrate important past and present achievements of spoken language research as well as past and present corpora available for such research. Some speakers reported on academic and technical advances from the past, while others offered information about state-of-the-art research on spoken language and spoken corpus compilation. Our idea with the symposium was also to bring together early career scholars, somewhat more senior scholars as well as senior scholars – the latter actually active when interest in spoken language and spoken corpus compilation was in its infancy. The type of spoken corpora in focus extended from the world's first publicly available, machine-readable spoken corpus, The London–Lund Corpus of Spoken English (Svartvik 1990), nowadays referred to as LLC–1, through to the spoken parts of The British National Corpora (BNC) from 1994 (BNC Consortium 2007) and 2014 (Love et al. 2017), The Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English (DCPSE) consisting of LLC–1 and the British component of The International Corpus of English (ICE–GB), Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (SBCSAE) (Du Bois et al. 2000–5), The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) (Davies 2008–) and finally the most recent one, The London–Lund Corpus 2 (LLC–2) (Põldvere, Johansson & Paradis 2021a). The symposium thus covered approximately half a century of data from publicly available corpora compiled for multipurpose use by the academic community for research on spoken English in different contexts.
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