Looking at the big picture through little windows: testing the usefulness of small corpora for the conservation and revitalisation of te reo Māori.

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2017-03-03

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The 40 years since the beginning of the Māori language revitalisation movement in Aotearoa/New Zealand has brought with it the inevitable decline in the population of older L1 speakers of Māori who were themselves raised by L1 parents. Facing the loss of this vital voice highlights the need for other forms of linguistic guidance for the reo Māori community in the modern period, particularly young learners and teachers of te reo. In this presentation, the author will attest to the usefulness of small corpora for this purpose, presenting some of the results of her two corpus-based studies of te reo Māori; the first a comparative study of two synchronic corpora for evidence of change in Māori syntax (Author, 2015), and the second the construction of a synchronic corpus of language from a single tribe, used to capture elements of dialectal distinctiveness. The author will discuss some of the issues encountered in both studies, including balancing the principles of comparability and representativeness, and statistical versus practical significance, and technological limitations with regards to corpus construction and analysis. She will also outline some of the benefits gained through these studies, both for the linguist, and the language community, highlighting the validity and advantages of the use of small corpora, even those just a fraction of the millions of words typically prescribed for corpus-based linguistic study. References: Author. 2015, Aspects of change in the syntax of Māori – a corpus based study, Ph.D. thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ.

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