ISK Speiderproject 2012-Language Documentation and e-information

About this project

Well constructed corpora are not only a result of an in-depth linguistic analysis, but that they also can inform linguistic research. In spite of a growing number of public language corpora, finding the information that is relevant to one's specific research purpose is still a challenge. When looking for linguistic information on the web, a lot can be found, yet standard search engines give us very general information peppered with information that is totally useless making search on the net also for a researcher often a waste time.

The beginning of our needs as linguists regarding to the current search technologies can be represented by the question: How does one get close to the pulse of agents that deal with language? Our answer is that for those, dealing with languages, what really matters is to gain direct access to linguistic data and to find easy ways to interpret this data. Therefore, in our project, we would like to show one possible way to provide users of language with the access to data they seek and the necessary insight to interpret this data.

This project is meant to show that results of linguistic research can be made interesting not only to other linguists, but also to language learners and lovers of language in a simple and direct way. Our intention is to provide direct access to part of our research data, in our project, but beyond that goal, we would like to focus on how we can make our data-driven research interesting and easy to grasp.

Funded by Department of Language and Communication of of NTNU, this project starts from Jan. 2012 to Jul. 2012. It focuses on language documentation and e-information where the future tense of Brazilian Portuguese and Serial Verb Constructions of Mandarin Chinese are the two specific linguistic phenomena to be investigated. With the template of wikipage provided by the online database TypeCraft, and with active use of multimedia, the project tries to make the linguistic metadata more accessible and attractive not only to linguists but also to non-linguists who are interested in language teaching and language learning.