Sociophonetic variation in a long-term language contact situation: /l/-darkening in Welsh-English bilingual speech

This study investigates /l/-darkening in the Welsh and English speech of bilinguals in North Wales. Although it is claimed that /l/ is dark in all syllable positions in northern varieties of both languages, there have been no quantitative investigations of this feature which consider cross-linguistic phonetic differences, the differing nature of language contact between North East and North West Wales, and differences in the way both languages are acquired by speakers. The dataset of 32 Welsh-English bilinguals, aged 16-18, was stratified by speaker sex, home language, and area. Tokens of /l/ in word-initial onset and word-final coda positions were analysed acoustically. The results show cross-linguistic differences in onset position and that such differences were found to be greater in the speech of female participants and those from North West Wales. Differences were also found between Welsh-dominant and English-dominant communities. These results are discussed with reference to the influence of extra-linguistic factors on speech production and the possible social meaning associated with dark /l/

Interlinearization in ELAN

We present new developments in the multimedia annotation tool ELAN, with a focus on the Interlinearization mode, a text oriented interface for parsing and glossing of annotations, assisted by Analyzer software modules and a lexicon component. These features are particularly of interest to users in the field of language documentation

Intonation Units and “Sentences” in ELAN and Toolbox

The very first step in creating annotation in language documentation consists in segmenting the recording, in preparation for the subsequent basic annotation – adding a transcription and a translation. ELAN is one of the most often used tools for these first steps, while Toolbox continues to be often chosen for the following step of annotation: adding basic glossing (splitting word forms into morphs and glossing each morph while building up a lexical database of morphemes and stems/words). One question that continues to cause difficulties and debate is: what are the basic units into which a recording is to be segmented, intonation units (= intonation[al]/prosodic units), or (larger) “sentences”? N. Himmelmann, for one (p.c.), argues that in language documentation, the orality of speech should take the primacy and therefore, intonation units should be the basic segments for annotation, as is often done in discourse and conversational analysis. Sometimes it may even be questioned whether “sentences” are a phenomenon of written language only that often fail to apply in the case of non-written languages. This paper pursues two aims. First, it argues and illustrates, on the basis of the language that author A is investigating, that “sentences” (or more precisely: syntactic units, which are often larger than intonation units) not only do exist also in languages with no tradition in writing, but that they should be the very basis for any (morpho )syntactic analysis. On the other hand, recognizing the importance of intonation units, the authors propose that indeed both should be annotated in language documentation, and that from a methodological point of view it makes much sense to start with segmenting into intonation units. This poses the need for an efficient workflow that (a) avoids doubled segmenting and annotating in ELAN, and that (b) includes a solid round-trip-configuration for exporting basic annotation from ELAN to Toolbox, where basic glossing is done, and importing the result back from Toolbox into ELAN. It is the second aim of this talk to show such a workflow of segmenting, transcribing, translating and glossing. This workflow, which has been developed over years in practicing and teaching language documentation, is illustrated step by step, and the recommended settings for ELAN and Toolbox are presented. Without too much additional effort, one achieves documentation in a format that promises to be a good basis for both discourse and grammatical analysis. References Michael McCarthy and Ronald Carter (2001): Ten criteria for a spoken grammar. In E Hinkel and S Fotos (eds) New Perspectives on Grammar Teaching in Second Language Classrooms. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 51-75 Ronald Carter & Michael J McCarthy (1995): Grammar and the spoken language. Applied Linguistics 16 (2): 141-58 Liesbeth Degand and Anne Catherine Simon (2009): On identifying basic discourse units in speech: theoretical and empirical issues. Discours 4, special issue: Linearization and Segmentation in Discourse. URL : http://discours.revues.org/index5852.html ELAN: a professional tool for the creation of complex annotations on video and audio resources; release 4.9.4, May 19, 2016; http://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/ Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Language Archive, Nijmegen, The Netherlands Nikolaus P Himmelmann, Meytal Sandler, Jan Strunk & Volker Unterladstetter (submitted): "On the robustness of intonational phrases in spontaneous speech – a crosslinguistic interrater study" Nikolaus P Himmelmann (p.c.): “Prosody in language documentation: Taking spoken language seriously”. Talk given similarly at several occasions, recently at the Summer school for digital humanities and language documentation, Batumi, Georgia, August 2016. Shlomo Izre'el (2005): Intonation Units and the Structure of Spontaneous Spoken Language: A View from Hebrew. In: Cyril Auran, Roxanne Bertrand, Catherine Chanet, Annie Colas, Albert Di Cristo, Cristel Portes, Alain Reynier and Monique Vion (eds.). Proceedings of the IDP05 International Symposium on Discourse-Prosody Interfaces. Toolbox: The Field Linguist’s Toolbox, Current version: 1.5.8, released February 2010, http://www-01.sil.org/computing/toolbox/index.htm, SIL International Wittenburg, P., Brugman, H., Russel, A., Klassmann, A., Author B. (2006): ELAN: a Professional Framework for Multimodality Research. In: Proceedings of LREC 2006, Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluatio

Improving the exploitation of linguistic annotations in ELAN

Abstract This paper discusses some improvements in recent and planned versions of the multimodal annotation tool ELAN, which are targeted at improving the usability of annotated files. Increased support for multilingual documents is provided, by allowing for multilingual vocabularies and by specifying a language per document, annotation layer (tier) or annotation. In addition, improvements in the search possibilities and the display of the results have been implemented, which are especially relevant in the interpretation of the results of complex multi-tier searches

Novel developments in ELAN

Modern language documentation depends on suitable software infrastructure. ELAN is a well-known tool developed at The Language Archive / MPI-PL which allows multi-tier, multi-speaker, time-linked annotation of audio and video recordings, in particular in a field work and language documentation setting. In the past two years ELAN has been under constant development. Here we will give an overview of the major recent enhancements to ELAN and ongoing work. These changes combined provide for a better and much faster process for the field linguist. Below we address five aspects, each consisting of multiple new features. We will discuss briefly their impact on typical workflows. First, there are modes that help you perform specialized tasks more efficiently. These are a) the segmentation mode, b) the transcription mode, and c) the interlinearization mode. With a focused user interface for each task, the segmentation and the transcription modes together provide very efficient means for the initial steps of a typical workflow. The interlinearization mode, which is still in an early phase of development, is optimized for the next steps of (morphological) parsing, glossing and tagging. It does so by providing an interface to a new program: Lexan. Lexan is an extensible system for "annotyzers" (annotation-suggestion modules). These can be used to perform many complex and simple tasks: from tier copying via word segmentation and interlinearization to machine learning. Second, the interoperability with FLEx (FieldWork Language Explorer) has been improved. An export function for the FLEx file format now complements the, updated, import function. Third, extensive support for performing operations on multiple files have been added. These include a) file-format conversion (including Toolbox and Praat), and b) creation of similarly structured EAF files for a selection of media files. Fourth, facilities have been added to create new tiers with annotations on the basis of existing tiers while applying logical operations. E.g. if the annotation occurs in both tier A and tier B, then copy it combined to tier C. The concept of creating new tiers on the basis of existing ones is currently further explored in Lexan (mentioned above). However these features provide for a straightforward interface to basic, but extremely helpful operations. Fifth, preliminary interaction with relevant web services (online audio-video and text processors that create annotations) has been implemented. In short, in the past years several crucial features have been added that make ELAN better and faster to use in many aspects

An exchange format for multimodal annotations

The paper presents the results of a joint effort of a group of multimodality researchers and tool developers to improve the interoperability between several tools used for the annotation and analysis of multimodality. Each of the tools has specific strengths so that a variety of different tools, working on the same data, can be desirable for project work. However this usually requires tedious conversion between formats. We propose a common exchange format for multimodal annotation, based on the annotation graph (AG) formalism, which is supported by import and export routines in the respective tools. In the current version of this format the common denominator information can be reliably exchanged between the tools, and additional information can be stored in a standardized way

An exchange format for multimodal annotations

This paper presents the results of a joint effort of a group of multimodality researchers and tool developers to improve the interoperability between several tools used for the annotation and analysis of multimodality. Each of the tools has specific strengths so that a variety of differ-ent tools, working on the same data, can be desirable for project work. However this usually re-quires tedious conversion between formats. We propose a common exchange format for multi-modal annotation, based on the annotation graph (AG) formalism, which is supported by import and export routines in the respective tools. In the current version of this format the common de-nominator information can be reliably exchanged between the tools, and additional information can be stored in a standardized way

Elan: a professional framework for multimodality research

Utilization of computer tools in linguistic research has gained importance with the maturation of media frameworks for the handling of digital audio and video. The increased use of these tools in gesture, sign language and multimodal interaction studies has led to stronger requirements on the flexibility, the efficiency and in particular the time accuracy of annotation tools. This paper describes the efforts made to make ELAN a tool that meets these requirements, with special attention to the developments in the area of time accuracy. In subsequent sections an overview will be given of other enhancements in the latest versions of ELAN, that make it a useful tool in multimodality research. 1