Corpus Linguistics 2013
Lancaster University, UK – 22nd to 26th July 2013
A Fully-annotated Pragmatic Corpus: The SPICE-Ireland Corpus
Workshop in conjunction with the Corpus Linguistics 2013 conference
Monday 22nd July 2013 – Lancaster University, UK
Organiser: John M. Kirk (jk@etinu.com)
SPICE-Ireland is an annotated version of the spoken component of ICE-Ireland, one of the national components comprising the International Corpus of English (cf. Greenbaum 1996). SPICE stands for 'Systems of Pragmatic Annotation in the Spoken Component of ICE-Ireland'. The SPICE-Ireland corpus comprises 600,000 words of transcribed spoken language, equally divided between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. In line with other ICE corpora, the spoken material in SPICE-Ireland contains 300 texts of 2,000-words from 15 spoken discourse situations. The transcriptions are annotated for the following features:
- utterance speech-act function
- prosody (pitch movements)
- utterance tags
- discourse markers
- quotatives
The aim of this workshop is to show that the SPICE-Ireland annotation scheme is without precedent in the information which it provides towards an unraveling of a speaker's pragmatic intent and the interpretation of a speaker's accommodation of face needs. More specifically, it aims:
- to introduce participants to each of the annotation sets and to explain their motivation and rationale;
- to share with participants some findings using the corpus;
- to provide an opportunity for using the corpus with the help of some specifically-designed tasks and topics;
- to provide consultation for any searches or analyses which participants might wish to undertake.
A copy of the SPICE-Ireland CD-ROM and SPICE-Ireland: A User’s Guide will be given to each registered participant.
Registration:
Participants should register for the workshop day via the CL2013 website (this can be done in addition to, or independently of, registration for the main conference). See this page for details: http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/cl2013/register.php.
Provisional timetable
| From 9:45am | Arrival and registration |
| 10:00-11:00 | From ICE to SPICE: Essential Preliminaries |
| 11:00-11:30am | Tea and coffee break |
| 11:30-1:00pm | Speech Acts, Prosody and SPICE: theory & results |
| 12:15-1:00pm | Tags and Quotatives and SPICE |
| 1:00-2:00pm | Lunch |
| 2:00-3:30pm | Discourse Markers, Utterance Tags, Quotatives and SPICE: theory and results |
| 3:30-4:00pm | Tea and coffee break |
| 4:00pm onwards | Practical Session: Demonstrations and Participant Queries or Contributions |
| By 6:00pm* | Whither Now? |
*The final session will end at 18.00 or whenever that session has ended naturally, whichever is earlier.