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Article published In:
Romance Parsed Corpora
Edited by Christina Tortora, Beatrice Santorini and Frances Blanchette
[Linguistic Variation 18:1] 2018
► pp. 100–119
Special issue articles

The challenges and benefits of annotating oral bilingual corpora

The Spanish in Texas Corpus Project

 | University of Texas – Austin
 | George Mason University
 | University of Texas – Austin
 | Northeastern State University
This article describes efforts to collect, process, and automatically annotate a corpus of Spanish as spoken in Texas. It elaborates the protocols for the development of the corpus and the procedures for automatic annotation, illustrating the common pitfalls to language identification in bilingual corpora and potential methods for circumventing them. The benefits of a comparative corpus approach to contact varieties is illustrated by a case study of a putative verbal calque from the Spanish in Texas data. It is demonstrated that the relative frequency of the verb is much higher than in its source Mexican variety and that the verb selects different complements in Texas than it does in other varieties. The article concludes with a discussion of how computational tools might be fruitfully exploited to resolve long-standing debates about language variation in contact settings.
Keywords: language contact, bilingualism, calques, Spanish, annotation, bilingual corpora, natural language processing, language identification
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Spanish in Texas Corpus
    • 2.1Protocols for developing the Corpus
    • 2.2Procedures for annotation
  • 3.The benefits of a corpus approach to contact phenomena
  • 4.Case Study: Is an innovation contact induced or internally motivated?
    • 4.1Detection of the potentially innovative uses of the verb
    • 4.2Possibilities and limitations of a computational approach to calques
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.00006.bul
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