Table Of ContentSpoken Corpus Linguistics
In this book Adolphs and Carter explore key approaches to work in spoken
corpus linguistics. The book discusses some of the pioneering challenges
faced in designing, building and utilising insights from the analysis of spo-
ken corpora, arguing that, even though written text is heavily privileged in
corpus research, the spoken language can reveal patterns of language use
that are both different and distinctive and that this has important implica-
tions for the way in which language is described, for the study of human
communication and for the field of applied linguistics as a whole.
Spoken Corpus Linguistics is divided into two main parts. The first part
sets the scene by discussing traditional and new approaches to monomodal
spoken corpus analysis, with a focus on discourse organisation and con-
versational interaction and with particular attention to forms of language
such as discourse markers and multi-word units, areas of language not con-
ventionally described but which are argued to be of importance to spoken
language description and to spoken language learning and teaching research
within the field of applied linguistics. The second part of the book moves
into the multimodal domain and focuses on alignments between language
and gesture in a spoken corpus, with particular reference to gestural move-
ments of the head and the hand and to the different ways in which prosody
might be used to enhance communication. A brief final chapter discusses
new developments in the area of spoken corpus research, including the rela-
tionship between language and context, emerging research methods as well
as discussing possible shifts in scope and emphasis in spoken corpus research
in the future.
Svenja Adolphs is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the Uni-
versity of Nottingham.
Ronald Carter is Professor of Modern English Language at the University of
Nottingham.
Routledge Advances in Corpus Linguistics
Edited by Tony McEnery, Lancaster University, UK
Michael Hoey, Liverpool University, UK
1 Swearing in English 8 Public Discourses of Gay Men
Bad Language, Purity and Power Paul Baker
from 1586 to the Present
Tony McEnery 9 Semantic Prosody
A Critical Evaluation
2 Antonymy Dominic Stewart
A Corpus-Based Perspective
Steven Jones 10 Corpus Assisted Discourse
Studies on the Iraq Conflict
3 Modelling Variation in Spoken Wording the War
and Written English Edited by John Morley and Paul
David Y. W. Lee Bayley
4 The Linguistics of Political 11 Corpus-Based Contrastive
Argument Studies of English and Chinese
The Spin-Doctor and the Wolf- Richard Xiao and Tony McEnery
Pack at the White House
Alan Partington 12 The Discourse of Teaching
Practice Feedback
5 Corpus Stylistics A Corpus-Based Investigation of
Speech, Writing and Thought Spoken and Written Modes
Presentation in a Corpus of Fiona Farr
English Writing
Elena Semino and Mick Short 13 Corpus Approaches to
Evaluation
6 Discourse Markers Across Susan Hunston
Languages
A Contrastive Study of Second- 14 Corpus Stylistics and Dickens’s
Level Discourse Markers in Fiction
Native and Non-Native Text with Michaela Mahlberg
Implications for General and
Pedagogic Lexicography 15 Spoken Corpus Linguistics
Dirk Siepmann From Monomodal to Multimodal
Svenja Adolphs and Ronald Carter
7 Grammaticalization and English
Complex Prepositions
A Corpus-Based Study
Sebastian Hoffmann
Spoken Corpus Linguistics
From Monomodal to Multimodal
Svenja Adolphs and Ronald Carter
First published 2013
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the UK
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
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© 2013 Taylor & Francis
The right of Svenja Adolphs and Ronald Carter to be identified as author
of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Adolphs, Svenja, author.
Spoken Corpus Linguistics : From monomodal to multimodal / Svenja
Adolphs and Ronald Carter.
pages cm. — (Routledge Advances in Corpus Linguistics ; 15)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Corpora (Linguistics) 2. Discourse analysis. 3. Speech acts
(Linguistics) 4. Linguistic analysis (Linguistics) 5. Grammar,
Comparative and general. 6. Computational linguistics. I. Carter,
Ronald, 1947– author. II. Title.
P128.C68A36 2013
410.1'88—dc23
2012042037
ISBN: 978-0-415-88829-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-52614-9 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
PART I
Monomodal Spoken Corpus Analysis
1 Making a Start: Building and Analyzing a Spoken Corpus 5
2 Corpus and Spoken Interaction: Multi-Word Units
in Spoken English 22
3 From Concordance to Discourse: Responses to Speakers 37
4 Case Studies in Applied Spoken Corpus Linguistics 67
PART II
Multimodal Spoken Corpus Analysis
5 Sound Evidence: Prosody and Spoken Corpora 111
6 Moving Beyond the Text 142
7 Developing a Framework for Analyzing ‘Headtalk’
and ‘Handtalk’: First Steps 158
8 Future Directions 178
Appendix 183
Notes 185
References 187
Index 203
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to our series editors, Tony McEnery and Michael Hoey, for their pa -
tience, support, always helpful critical comment and always good guidance
at all stages in the writing of this book.
This book draws on research that we have undertaken in the field of spo-
ken corpus linguistics over the course of the past 15 years or so and in that
sense is a summary collection of research material that has involved collab-
orative work on many fronts as part of funded research projects, coauthor-
ship of books and articles, research reports and conference papers. Thanks
are due to many colleagues and friends, all of whom have kindly granted
us permission to use material that we have co-written, co-constructed, and
co-designed or previously published with them both as part of our overall
narrative and argument and as part of specific case studies. In this sense the
book is also fundamentally a compilation with many voices, and we offer
therefore warmest thanks to Irina Dahlmann, Dave Evans, Loretta Fung,
Daniel Hunt, Anne O’Keeffe, Dawn Knight, Mike McCarthy, Ron Marti-
nez, Phoebe Ming-sum Lin, Pawel Szudarski and Catherine Smith. Thanks,
too, to Peter Stockwell, Sarah Atkins and Dave Evans who have also gen-
erously allowed us to use video images of them. Special thanks are due to
Dawn Knight who worked as a researcher with us on several ESRC-funded
projects and who has been an irreplaceable source of advice, guidance and
support to us during the course of these and other projects.
In the writing of this book, we have also used material from previously
published papers and chapters in books. In all cases the material has been
rewritten, or recast, revised and updated for the purposes of this book.
These are ‘Discourse markers and spoken English: Native and learner use in
pedagogic settings’, Applied Linguistics, 28 (3) (2007), 410–439 (Fung and
Carter); ‘This, that and the other’: Multi-word clusters in spoken English as
visible patterns of interaction’, TEANGA 21, 30–52 (2004) (McCarthy and
Carter);‘Beyond the text: Construction and analysis of multi-modal linguistic
corpora’, 2nd Annual International e-Social Science conference, http://www.
ncess.ac.uk/research/sgp/headtalk/, June 2006, University of Manchester (multi-
authored) ‘HeadTalk’, ‘HandTalk’ and the corpus: Towards a framework for
multi-modal, multi-media corpus development, Corpora (2009), 4(1), 1–32
viii Acknowledgments
(Knight, Evans, Carter and Adolphs); ‘Listening to lectures: thinking smaller’,
European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL (1 (1) (2012) (Carter,
Martinez, Adolphs and Smith); Linking the verbal and visual: New directions
for Corpus Linguistics Language and Computers. 64, 275–291 (Carter and
Adolphs); From Corpus to Classroom: Language Use and Language Teach-
ing (CUP: Cambridge, 2007) (O’Keeffe, McCarthy and Carter); ‘Building a
spoken corpus: what are the basics? In: O’Keeffe, A. and McCarthy, M. (eds)
The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics. London: Routledge, 2010:
38–52 (Adolphs and Knight); Pauses as an Indicator of Psycholinguistically
Valid Multi-Word Expressions (MWUs)? In: Proceedings of Association of
Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2007 workshop ‘A Broader Perspective on
Multiword Expressions’: 49–56. (Dahlmann and Adolphs); ‘Beyond the Word:
New challenges in analysing corpora of spoken English’ European Journal of
English Studies 11 (2) (2007): 133–146 (Carter and Adolphs); ‘Corpus Lin-
guistics’ In: Simpson, J. (ed) The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguis-
tics. (London: Routledge, 2010) (Adolphs and Lin); ‘Response tokens in
British and Irish discourse: Corpus, context and variational pragmatics’, In:
Barron, A. and Schneider, K. (eds) Variational Pragmatics. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins; (2008) (O’Keeffe and Adolphs); ‘Sound evidence: A multimodal
corpus-based study into the notion of holistic processing of multiword units’,
In: Barfield, A. and Gyllstad, H. (eds) Collocating in Another Language:
Multiple Interpretations. (Palgrave, Macmillan, 2009) (Lin and Adolphs);
Multi-modal spoken corpus analysis and language description: the case of
multi-word expressions. In: Baker P., (ed), Contemporary Approaches to Cor-
pus Linguistics (London, Continuum Press, 2009) (Dahlman and Adolphs);
Using a corpus to study spoken language. In: Hunston, S. and Oakey, D. (eds),
Doing Applied Linguistics: Key concepts and skills for postgraduate study
(London: Routledge) (Adolphs).
Our research on monomodal corpora has been funded by Cambridge
University Press, and we thank the Press for allowing us to use sample
extracts from the CANCODE corpus (now part of the over one-billion
word Cambridge English Corpus) with the following citation: “CANCODE
means Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English. The
corpus consists of five million words of informal conversations recorded
across the islands of Britain and Ireland. Cambridge University Press is the
sole copyright holder.” Where indicated, BNC data cited herein has been
extracted from the British National Corpus Online service, managed by
Oxford University Computing Services on behalf of the BNC Consortium.
All rights in the texts cited are reserved. Some examples of usage taken from
the British National Corpus were obtained under the terms of the BNC End
User License. Copyright in the individual texts cited resides with the original
IPR holders. For information and licensing conditions relating to the BNC,
please see the website at http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk
This book also draws on previously published research material produced
in connection with three Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)
Acknowledgments ix
funded research projects. All previous publications and ESRC research
reports have been re-accented, restructured, revised and updated, and new
data has been added, where appropriate. Our research on multimodal cor-
pora has been funded by ESRC (grant numbers RES-149–25–1067, RES-
149–25–0035, RES-149–25–1016), EPSRC (grant number EP/C548191/1)
and again partly in collaboration with Cambridge University Press.
Svenja Adolphs and Ronald Carter, Nottingham
August 2012
