Welcome
to the Appalachian English Syntax Webpage
This website contains two parts:
[1] Information on the in-progress project A
syntactically annotated corpus of Appalachian English
[2] Information on the collaborative project on Appalachian Morpho-Syntax
[1] A syntactically annotated corpus of Appalachian
English, Christina Tortora & Beatrice Santorini (PIs)
This project aims to create an innovative database which
will further research in the various subdisciplines of Linguistics, and afford
a novel approach to the analysis of English dialect data. Specifically, we aim
to create an on-line, freely accessible, ~1,000,000-word syntactically
annotated (or ÒparsedÓ) corpus of Appalachian speech. The proposed parsed
corpus will be accompanied by a full set of digitized, text-searchable
recordings of the speech from which the corpus is transcribed, in the form of
.wav files. The .wav files on which the parsed corpus is based will be
text-searchable using the freely accessible program Praat (http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat), as
a result of aligning the transcripts with the speech signal, using the
Òtext-to-speechÓ alignment technology developed and made available by the
University of Pennsylvania (http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phonetics/p2fa/).
This project, which would create the first such corpus of Appalachian speech,
or of any English dialect for that matter, will be based on the Archive of
Traditional Appalachian Speech and Culture, an unparsed corpus of speech
collected and transcribed from recordings from various colleges and
institutions in the Appalachian region, by Michael Montgomery,
Distinguished Professor Emeritus at U. of South Carolina. In addition, it will
include the unparsed corpus of recorded speech collected under a prior NSF
Grant (#BCS-0617197; 2006-10). The entire corpus will be made available to the
public, and searchable and manipulable with CorpusSearch2 (http://www.corpussearch.sourceforge.net),
also freely accessible.
Our most recent NSF project description (submitted July
2011) can be found here:
Collaborative
Research: A syntactically annotated corpus of Appalachian English
[2] Collaborative Research on Appalachian Morpho-Syntax
For our more recent and more developed project
website, go to:
http://www.ling.yale.edu/~zanuttini/Appalachian%20project/index.html
Project Collaborators (click for
more info on the CollaboratorsÕ Backgrounds):
Judy Bernstein (William
Paterson University)
Marcel den Dikken (City University of New York:
The Graduate Center)
Christina Tortora (City
University of New York: College of Staten Island and The Graduate Center)
Raffaella
Zanuttini (Yale
University)
Our NSF Project Proposal (01/16/06):
Collaborative
Research: The
Comparative Morpho-Syntax of Appalachian English
This project was supported by
the following NSF Collaborative Grants:
#BCS-0617197 (Tortora), 2006-2010
#BCS-0617210 (Bernstein), 2006-2008
#BCS-0616573 (Den Dikken), 2006-2010
#BCS-0617133 (Zanuttini),
2006-2008