Universals of reference in discourse and grammar: Evidence from the Multi-CAST collection of spoken corpora

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dc.contributor.authorHaig, Geoffrey
dc.contributor.authorSchnell, Stefan
dc.contributor.authorSchiborr, Nils Norman
dc.date.accessioned2022-01-24T19:37:25Z
dc.date.available2022-01-24T19:37:25Z
dc.date.issued2021
dc.description.abstractData from under-researched languages are now available in sufficient quantity and quality to feed into corpus-based approaches to language typology. In this paper we present Multi-CAST (Multilingual Corpus of Annotated Spoken Texts), a project designed to facilitate cross-linguistic comparison of naturalistic discourse across typologically diverse languages, which implements a purpose-built shared annotation scheme. After sketching the rationale and architecture of Multi-CAST, we illustrate the efficacy of the method with two case-studies: The first one investigates the rates of lexical (as opposed to pronominal and zero) realization of arguments in discourse across a sample of 15 typologically diverse languages. Our results reveal a remarkable and hitherto unnoticed uniformity in the density of lexical references, despite the lack of content control in the corpora. The second addresses the question of whether cross-linguistically attested regularities in morphosyntax can meaningfully be related to frequency effects in discourse. We find some support for frequency-based explanations, but our data also show that the frequency accounts leave several key questions unanswered. Overall, our findings underscore that research based on language documentation-derived corpus data, and in particular spoken language data, is not only possible, but in fact crucially necessary for testing frequency-based explanations, because these data stem from spoken language and typologically diverse languages. We also identify a number of epistemological and methodological shortcomings with our approach, and discuss some of the requirements for further innovation in areas of corpus building, corpus annotation, and typological comparability.
dc.identifier.citationHaig, Geoffrey & Schnell, Stefan & Schiborr, Nils N. 2021. Universals of reference in discourse and grammar: Evidence from the Multi-CAST collection of spoken corpora. In Haig, Geoffrey & Schnell, Stefan & Seifart, Frank (eds.), Doing corpus-based typology with spoken language data: State of the art, 141–177. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai'i Press.
dc.identifier.isbn978-0-9979673-0-2
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10125/74660
dc.publisherUniversity of Hawai'i Press
dc.relation.ispartofseriesLD&C Special Publication
dc.rightsCreative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike Licence
dc.subjectcorpus-based typology
dc.subjectuniversals of language use
dc.subjectdiscourse structure
dc.subjectreferential choice
dc.subjectmarking asymmetries
dc.titleUniversals of reference in discourse and grammar: Evidence from the Multi-CAST collection of spoken corpora

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LD&C Special Publication No. 25: Doing Corpus-Based Typology With Spoken Language Corpora