Corpus-based Studies of Lesser-described Languages: The CorpAfroAs corpus of spoken AfroAsiatic languages (Studies in Corpus Linguistics)

For a long time, Toolbox has been the most used software dedicated to text annotation in the community of field linguists, especially for African linguistics. However, its limitations, and the growing need to pair text and sound, have made it important to find another solution to text annotation. This paper, aimed at a readership of information technology specialists, is a presentation of the software development conducted within the CorpAfroAs project on the basis of the software ELAN, developed by the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen. This development, whose result is the ELAN-CorpA software, involves the addition of an internal parser linked to a lexicon, for semi-automatic interlinearization purposes. This volume presents new findings based on the analysis of spoken corpora in thirteen different Afro-Asiatic languages – a unique endeavor in the domain of lesser-described languages. It will be of interest to corpus linguists, general linguists, typologists, and linguists specializing in Afro-Asiatic languages. In addition to the rarity of corpus studies based on endangered and lesser-described languages, the volume is remarkable due to its focus on the role of prosody in interaction with several other phenomena, including code-switching and borrowing. Phonology, syntax, and information structure are explored, and the issue of the elaboration of strategies for the typological comparison of corpora is addressed in several papers. The volume also contains a presentation of software development conducted within the scope of the CorpAfroAs project and based upon the widely used ELAN. The sound-indexed, and morphosyntactically-annotated corpora, with their OLAC metadata and several other deliverables can be accessed and searched at http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/scl.68.website. Edited By Amina Mettouchi, Martine Vanhove, Dominique Caubet, Llcan, Paris. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.