Bootstrapping Information from Corpora in a Cross-Linguistic Perspective

The achievements of Romance language corpus-driven studies deserve more attention from the scientific community at the world level for both their quantity and quality. This book contains papers given at the 3rd International LABLITA Workshop in Corpus Linguistics (Italian Department, University of Florence, June 4th-5th 2008 ), and it aims at integrating new ideas and results derived from Romance language corpora in the framework of the overall achievements of Corpus Linguistics. The volume contains the contribution of a leading scholar of Corpus Linguistics (Douglas Biber), and a set of articles presented to Biber by notable European researchers and those from other countries. Papers report on long-term studies ranging from Italian to Spanish, French, Brazilian Portuguese and Japanese

Corpora orais e pragmática

The goal of this paper is to present arguments in favour of two points related to the study of oral corpora and pragmatics: a) at the level of annotation, corpora must ensure the parsing of the speech flow into utterances on the basis of prosodic cues and provide an easy access to the acoustic source; b) at the level of sampling, corpora must ensure the maximum representation of context variation, rather than speaker variation. We will present the reasons which support the very basic prosodic annotation of speech (prosodic boundaries) as a means to obtain relevant data from the speech flow. Starting from our present knowledge about the distribution of speech acts types in spoken corpora, we will present the reasons why building corpora in accordance to a context variation strategy should expand our knowledge of pragmatics. Additionally, we will claim that prosody is the necessary interface between locutive and illocutive acts and we will show that a deeper prosodic analysis is necessary to grasp unknown speech act types from language usage. Finally, we will briefly sketch the main assumptions of the Language into Act Theory (CRESTI, 2000) which is dedicated to the link between prosody and pragmatics and helps make explicit core aspects of pragmatic knowledge

The role of prosody for the expression of illocutionary types. The prosodic system of questions in spoken Italian and French according to Language into Act Theory

This article presents a corpus-based study of the correlations between prosodic contours and question speech acts in Italian and French from the perspective of the Language into Act Theory (L-AcT). A rich taxonomy of question illocutionary types is derived from two comparable corpora of informal speech taken from the C-ORAL-ROM collection and illustrated through prototypic examples. The number of questions in speech is evaluated as <10% of utterances. Despite their syntactic and accentual differences, the two languages share comparable pragmatic values conveyed by defined prosodic variations. Total questions, which can be answered with yes or no, are expected with canonical rising contours. Still, a good percentage shows the so-called declarative prosody (26% in FR and 36% in IT). They have been supposed to be biased by presupposing the proposition's truth and considered Requests for confirmations instead of genuinely Seeking for information acts. But presupposition, depending on intentional states, is hard to be detected, and no clear linguistic correlation was found. The corpus-based study of the prosody/pragmatics relation allows a better understanding of the system. Total questions should be framed within the larger category of Directives aimed at the addressee's linguistic behavior, which does not foresee seeking information as the only goal. When the speaker makes a hypothesis on what he asks—that is not an actual presupposition—he performs a Request for confirmation. This is true in most Total questions, and prosody complies with the canonical contour. In contrast, declarative contours correlate with corpus contexts in which the speaker does not make any hypothesis but puts pressure on the addressee (Challenging Questions). Partial questions genuinely seek information and comprise Open questions, which are verbless utterances where the addressee is requested to freely provide information on a given topic. Tag questions, Double questions, and Alternative questions correspond to Illocutionary patterns that, according to L-AcT, are composed of two pragmatic units framed within one prosodic strategy

IMAGACT: Deriving an Action Ontology from Spoken Corpora

This paper presents the IMAGACT annotation infrastructure which uses both corpus - based and competence - based methods for the simultaneous extraction of a language independent Action ontology from English and Italian spontaneous speech corpora. The infrastructure relies on an innovative methodology based on images of prototypical scenes and will identify high frequency action concepts in everyday life, suitable for the implementation of an open set of languages

LABLITA-Suite. Risorse per l’acquisizione dell’italiano L2

LABLITA-Suite. Resources for the acquisition of Italian as a second language – LABLITA-suite provides technology-enhanced learning resources for the acquisition of Italian L2. IMAGACT allows for mastering the semantic properties of action verbs in the early phases of language acquisition. The LABLITA corpus of Spoken Italian can be used for training learners for face to face conversations. RIDIRE and CORDIC provide corpus linguistic tools for accessing Italian phraseology, which is useful for enhancing writing capabilities in the various domains of language usage