Developments in the spoken component of ICE corpora

Abstract

This article considers the evolution of spoken components within the International Corpus of English. It begins with the classic orthographic transcription which has long been taken as a written means for representing what was said. Following a critique, the article suggests ways in which the representation of the spoken language in corpora could be better achieved: through the availability of recordings, through the alignment of recordings with the transcription, and through more annotation, especially of prosodic and pragmatic types, as in the SPICE‐Ireland Corpus. It ends with a discussion of the usefulness of a multi‐layer architecture approach to corpus compilation and exploitability.

The International Corpus of English project: A progress report

“…Only one component has been prosodically tagged: ICE‐Ireland, and the resulting corpus (known as the SPICE‐Ireland corpus: ‘ S ystems of P ragmatic annotation in the spoken component of the ICE ‐Ireland corpus’ (Kirk, Kallen, Lowry, Rooney, & Mannion, )) has been pragmatically tagged with respect to speech acts (after the defining notions by Searle, , ), utterance tags (which include declarative as well as interrogative polarity‐marking sentence tags, but also vocatives and discourse markers used sentence‐ or utterance‐finally), quotatives (citations of speech attributed to another speaker and supposedly rendered verbatim or directly) and, of course, discourse markers (such as well or kind of ) (Kallen & Kirk, ; Kirk, ). A further initiative has been the adoption of standoff architecture using ANNIS, as developed by an independent project for ICE‐Ireland (Kirk, ).…”

“…As one respondent remarked, the addition of ‘more annotations […] will make any linguistic analysis easier’. However, there was some recognition that annotation often required time‐consuming manual insertion, as happened with the prosodic and pragmatic annotations in SPICE‐Ireland (Kirk, ). A further type of annotation concerns the synchronization of the spoken transcription with the original audio or video recording, for which considerable support and desire was expressed.…”

“…[…] will make any linguistic analysis easier' . However, there was some recognition that annotation often required time-consuming manual insertion, as happened with the prosodic and pragmatic annotations in SPICE-Ireland (Kirk, 2017…”

“…NOTES 1 Since this article was drafted, World Englishes 36 (3) has appeared, with several papers on ICE, touching on some similar points, notably in Edwards (2017), Gut and Fuchs (2017), Kirk (2017), Loureiro-Porto (2017), with an introductory overview by Nelson (2017) himself. 2 Early references to ICE are Greenbaum (1988Greenbaum ( , 1990aGreenbaum ( , 1990bGreenbaum ( , 1990cGreenbaum ( , 1991aGreenbaum ( , 1991bGreenbaum ( , 1992Greenbaum ( , 1992Greenbaum ( , 1993Greenbaum ( , 1994Greenbaum ( , 1996aGreenbaum ( , 1996bNelson, 1991Nelson, , 1995Nelson, , 1996Nelson, , 2002aNelson, , 2002b.…”

“…Since this article was drafted, World Englishes 36(3) has appeared, with several papers on ICE, touching on some similar points, notably in Edwards (), Gut and Fuchs (), Kirk (), Loureiro‐Porto (), with an introductory overview by Nelson () himself.…”