A prototype of a syntactically annotated corpus of Appalachian English

FAIN: HD-51543-12

CUNY Research Foundation, College of Staten Island (Staten Island, NY 10314-6609)
Christina Tortora (Project Director: October 2011 to present)

The continued development of a database of syntactically annotated Appalachian English that aligns speech files to text transcriptions.

This project aims to create an innovative database with a new approach to the analysis of dialect data, furthering research in linguistics and in other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. The ultimate product will be an on-line, freely accessible, ~1,000,000 word, "syntactically annotated" (or "parsed") corpus of Appalachian speech. A syntactically annotated corpus is a body of text which has been annotated with syntactic tags; such annotation assigns syntactic structure to the text, allowing the user to find and statistically study lexical and syntactic configurations of any type. This project would create the first such corpus of Appalachian speech, and will also be of use to educators interested in the vocabulary and grammar of Appalachian English, and to scholars investigating the sociology or social history of the Appalachian region. It will be made available to the public, and will be searchable with open-source, free, and fully accessible software.

Associated Products