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Article published In:
Compilation, transcription, markup and annotation of spoken corpora
Edited by John M. Kirk and Gisle Andersen
[International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 21:3] 2016
► pp. 372–395

Accounting for ELF

Categorising the unconventional in POS-tagging the VOICE corpus

| University of Vienna

This paper reports on some issues encountered when using various ‘external points of reference’ in the development of POS-tagging guidelines for the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE). VOICE is a corpus of spoken English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) containing naturally occurring, plurilingual data. As in all kinds of natural language use, speakers recorded in VOICE exploit available linguistic resources, often resulting in non-codified language use and language which is difficult to classify unambiguously. However, detailed tagging solutions for such phenomena are rarely reported. We discuss usefulness and limitations of external points of reference with regard to their suitability for POS-tagging VOICE and address methodological as well as practical issues, especially the handling of non-codified language use and different types of ambiguities. We suggest that the solutions found, and the theoretical approach adopted, could be relevant for the tagging of other spoken corpora.

Keywords: POS-tagging standards, spoken corpora, English as a lingua franca (ELF), ambiguities, non-codified language use
Published online: 29 September 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.21.3.04osi
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Cited by (1)

Cited by 1 other publications

Riegler, Stefanie
2023. Annotating VOICE for Pedagogic Purposes: The Case for a Mark-up Scheme of Pragmatic Functions in ELF Interactions. In Demystifying Corpus Linguistics for English Language Teaching, ► pp. 207 ff. DOI logo

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