B027821 - CORPUS LINGUISTICS

Italian

The building of linguistic resources and their exploration; spoken corpora and speech analysis: pragmatic foundations and prosodic functions; gesture and multimodal corpora

E Cresti. A. Panunzi, "Introduzione ai corpora dell'italiano", Bologna, Mulino, 2013.
P. Sorianello, "Prosodia. Modelli e ricerca empirica", Roma, Carocci, 2006.

Further readings:
F. Albano Leoni, P. Maturi, "Manuale di fonetica", Roma, Carocci, 2018(3).
E. Campisi, "Che cos'è la gestualità", Roma, Carocci, 2018.
A. Lenci, S. Montemagni, V. Pirrelli, "Testo e computer. Elementi di linguistica computazionale", Roma, Carocci, 2016(2).
E. Lombardi Vallauri, "La struttura informativa. Forma e funzione negli enunciati linguistici", Carocci, 2009.
A. Ferrari, "Linguistica del testo", Roma, Carocci, 2014.
T. Raso, H. Mello (eds), "Spoken Corpora and Linguistic Studies", Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 2014.
M. Voghera, "Dal parlato alla grammatica. Costruzione e forma dei testi spontanei", Roma, Carocci, 2017.

Knowledge:
The course aims to provide the main knowledge and understanding tools for corpus-based linguistic studies, also in the perspective of applying the acquired knowledge within broader contexts and developing new ideas within research contexts. The knowledge objectives regard, more specifically, the acquisition of: specialized terminology; computer tools for the analysis of linguistic and textual data; theoretical and practical tools for the analysis of spoken language, including the prosodic dimension; theoretical and practical tools for the analysis of corpora in a textual perspective.

Competence:
Among the course objectives, there are the acquisition of the abilities to communicate in a clear way the acquired knowledge, and to develop integrated learning abilities that allow the student to formulate autonomous judgements and to deal with complex issues in the linguistic field.

Basic knowledge of general linguistics.

Face to face lessons; practical exercises for linguistic analysis and corpora building.

The slides of the course will be available.

The examination will be oral for all students. During the exam, the students will present a work (previously agreed with the teacher) regarding the transcription and annotation of a spontaneous speech recording, or a corpus based (spoken/written) linguistic analysis of a grammatical or lexical phenomenon. The examination will consist of at least three questions on the different sections of the course, in order to cover all the topics addressed during the lessons, and namely: (a) corpus definition, structure, and annotation; (b) characteristics of spoken language and its analysis; (c) interaction between prosody, pragmatics and gesture.
Students need to demonstrate a sufficient knowledge of all parts of the program in order to pass the examination. Moreover, the examiners will also assess the communication skills of the students as well as their ability to establish connections among the different topics and to re-elaborate the knowledge acquired during the course in an autonomous way. The final mark will consist of the average mark obtained in the different sections.
In brief, the examination aims to assess: (a) the knowledge of the theoretical fundations and the specific terminology of the discipline; (b) the knowledge of the specific characteristics of spoken language; (c) the ability to linguistically analyze spoken and written corpora, including dedicated computational tools.

(1) The corpus as source for linguistic data: sampling and representativeness; corpus building; lexicon distribution and frequency lists; exploring the corpus: concordances, collocations, regular expressions. (2) Spoken language analysis: dealing with oral data; functions of prosody; oral communication and pragmatics. (3) The role of gesture in language interaction. (4) Software tools for speech and multimodal analysis: Praat and ELAN