Writing the Vernacular: Transcribing and Tagging the Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English

Beal, J. and Corrigan, K. and Smith, N. and Rayson, P. (2007) Writing the Vernacular: Transcribing and Tagging the Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English. Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English, 1. ISSN 1797-4453

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Abstract

The Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (NECTE) presented a number of problems not encountered by those producing corpora of standard varieties. The primary material consisted of audio recordings which needed to be orthographically transcribed and grammatically tagged. Preston (1985), (2000), Macaulay (1991), Kirk (1997), Cameron (2001) and Beal (2005) all note that representing vernacular Englishes orthographically, e.g. by using "eye dialect", can be problematic on various levels. Apart from unwelcome associations with negative political, racial or social connotations, there are theoretical objections to devising non-standard spellings which represent certain groups of vernacular speakers, thus making their speech appear more differentiated from mainstream colloquial varieties than is warranted. In the first half of this paper, we outline the principles and methods adopted in devising an Orthographic Transcription Protocol (OTP) for such a vernacular corpus, and the challenges faced by the NECTE team in practice. Protocols for grammatical tagging have likewise been devised with standard varieties in mind. In the second half, we relate how existing part-of-speech (POS)-tagging software (CLAWS4, cf. Garside & Smith 1997; and Template Tagger, cf. Fligelstone et al. 1997) had to be adapted to take account of the non-standard grammar of Tyneside English.

Item Type:
Journal Article
Journal or Publication Title:
Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English
Uncontrolled Keywords:
/dk/atira/pure/researchoutput/libraryofcongress/qa75
Subjects:
?? CS_EPRINT_ID1518 CS_UID355QA75 ELECTRONIC COMPUTERS. COMPUTER SCIENCE ??
ID Code:
13005
Deposited By:
Deposited On:
21 Jun 2008 20:50
Refereed?:
Yes
Published?:
Published
Last Modified:
11 Sep 2023 12:18