The C-ORAL-ROM book and DVD provide a unique set of comparable corpora of spontaneous speech for the main Romance languages, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. The corpora are accompanied by comparative linguistic studies, models and standard linguistic measures of spoken language variability. Each corpus is built to the same design using identical sampling techniques, and each corpus is presented in multimedia format, allowing simultaneous access to aligned acoustic and textual information. Texts are headed with information about provenance, participants, etc. and the transcriptions show changes of speaker. Speech acts are tagged according to the evidence of prosodic criteria. Each corpus totals 300,000 words and presents formal and informal speech in a variety of contexts of use, dialogue structure and text genres, semantic domains and speech act typologies. The corpora have great statistical relevance for spoken language structures and can address key issues in human language technology such as speech recognition in unrestricted discourse, the suitability of speech synthesis in natural prosody, and multilingual applications of the spoken language interface. The work provides new data and innovative theoretical perspectives that are relevant for corpus linguistics, romance linguistics, syntactic theory, speech and prosody research, and second language acquisition.

The C-ORAL-ROM book and DVD provide a unique set of comparable corpora of spontaneous speech for the main Romance languages, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. The corpora are accompanied by comparative linguistic studies, models and standard linguistic measures of spoken language variability. Each corpus is built to the same design using identical sampling techniques, and each corpus is presented in multimedia format, allowing simultaneous access to aligned acoustic and textual information. Texts are headed with information about provenance, participants, etc. and the transcriptions show changes of speaker. Speech acts are tagged according to the evidence of prosodic criteria. Each corpus totals 300,000 words and presents formal and informal speech in a variety of contexts of use, dialogue structure and text genres, semantic domains and speech act typologies. The corpora have great statistical relevance for spoken language structures and can address key issues in human language technology such as speech recognition in unrestricted discourse, the suitability of speech synthesis in natural prosody, and multilingual applications of the spoken language interface. The work provides new data and innovative theoretical perspectives that are relevant for corpus linguistics, romance linguistics, syntactic theory, speech and prosody research, and second language acquisition.

UBLI has conducted field surveys since 2002 and built spoken language corpora for French, Spanish, Italian (Salentino dialect), Russian, Malaysian, Turkish, Japanese, and Canadian multilinguals. This volume features new research presented at the UBLI second workshop on Corpus Linguistics – Research Domain, which was held on September 14, 2006. The first part consisting of eleven presentations to this workshop shows a wide range of subjects within the area of corpus-based research, such as dictionary, linguistic atlas, dialect, translation, ancient texts, non-standard texts, sociolinguistics, second language acquisition, and natural language processing. The second part of this volume comprises ten additional contributions to both written and spoken corpora by the members and research assistants of UBLI.

This book examines the historical development of discourse and pragmatic markers across the Romance languages. Based on extensive data from several languages, distinguished scholars examine issues relevant to grammaticalization, pragmaticalization, and the interface between grammar and discourse.

Hedging is an essential part of everyday communication. It is a discourse strategy which is used to reduce commitment to the force or truth of an utterance to achieve an appropriate pragmatic effect. In recent years hedges have therefore attracted increased attention in Pragmatics and Applied Linguistics, with studies approaching the concept of hedging from various perspectives, such as speech act - and politeness theory, genre-specific investigations, interactional pragmatics, and studies of vague language. The present volume provides an up-to-date overview of current research on the topic by bringing together studies from a variety of fields. The contributions span a range of different languages, investigate the use of hedges in different communicative settings and text types, and consider all levels of linguistic analysis from prosody to morphology, syntax and semantics. What unites the different studies in this volume is a corpus-based approach, in which various theoretical concepts and categories are applied to, and tested against, actual language data. This allows for patterns of use to be uncovered which have previously gone unnoticed and provides valuable insights for the adjustment and fine-tuning of existing categories. The usage-based approach of the investigations therefore offers new theoretical and descriptive perspectives on the context-dependent nature and multifunctionality of hedges.

The volume presents recent results in the field of Information Structure based on research on Italian and Italian dialects, and on further studies on several typologically different languages. The central idea is that Information Structure is not an exclusive matter of syntax but an interface issue which involves the interplay of at least the phonological, morpho-syntactic and semantic-pragmatic levels of analysis. In addition, the volume is based on the study of actual language use and it adopts a cross-linguistic point of view.

This monograph describes the development of Rhapsodie, a 33,000-word syntactic and prosodic treebank of spoken French created with the aim of modeling the interface between prosody, syntax and discourse in spoken French. Theoretical foundations and methodological choices are presented and discussed, and compared with other contemporary approaches. Why is a data-driven instead of a corpus-based approach necessary when one wants to model and analyze discourse without neglecting the features typical of everyday speech, in order to capture not only what we say but also how we say it? How can one show that verbal exchange operates as a collaborative enterprise and how can the specific syntactic and prosodic markers of this collaboration be merged? The description proposed in this collective book is of interest for specialists of spoken French studies, and also for scholars who would like to extend Rhapsodie-like annotation schemes to other languages.