A Syntactically Annotated Corpus of Appalachian English

FAIN: FB-55760-11

Christina Tortora
CUNY Research Foundation, College of Staten Island (Staten Island, NY 10314-6609)

This project will create an on-line, freely accessible, ~1,000,000 word "syntactically annotated" (or "parsed") corpus of Appalachian speech. A parsed corpus is a body of written text or transcribed speech which has been annotated with syntactic tags, which assign syntactic structure to the corpus; this allows the user to find, count, and statistically manipulate syntactic configurations of any type. This project, which would create the first such corpus of a dialect of English, will be based on a range of existing recordings already available at colleges and universities in the Appalachian region, and will be made available for free to the public. It will be of use to linguists, and to any person interested in analyzing the vocabulary and grammar of Appalachian English. It will also serve as an analytical tool for educators, thus promising to broaden students' understanding of America's linguistic heritage, and to promote an appreciation of the value of regional culture and language.