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Corpus Description

DesignMatrix   Context Type   Interaction Types  

 This one-million word spoken corpus of Irish English discourse includes conversations recorded in a wide variety of mostly informal settings throughout Ireland. As it stands, it consists of 1 million words of spoken Irish English.The geographical boundary partially defines the collection of Irish English in this project.  All L-CIE data comes from a number of counties in the Republic of Ireland i.e. Limerick, Clare, Cork, Tipperary, Kerry, Wexford, Waterford, Kildare, Roscommon, Westmeath, Mayo and Dublin. However, as the corpus is not designed to be geographically representative, it does not include data from every county. Speakers range in age from fourteen to seventy-eight years of age and there is an equal representation of both male and female speakers.

There were three main stages in the compilation of the corpus.

• The first stage involved the corpus design (see design matrix) 
• The second stage involved the collection and transcription of data as well as the databasing of tapes and logging of speaker information.
• The third stage examined the transcriptions and involved the anonymization of the transcribed data.

Design Matrix

The design matrix for this corpus centres on a range of speaker relationships (from intimate to professional) across a range of interactional contexts and speech genres (see below). Like the Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus Of Discourse in English (CANCODE) (as described by McCarthy, 1998), L-CIE has developed a careful sociolinguistic classification scheme in order to make inter-corpus comparisons, especially with regard to linguistic choices and the relationships that hold between the speakers.

Context types

This axis of categorisation reflects the relationship that holds between the participants in the dyadic and multi-party conversations in the corpus. These relationships fall into five broad categories, which were identified at the outset: intimate, sociocultural, professional, transactional and pedagogic.

Intimate

In this category, the distance between the speakers is at a minimum and is often related to co-habitation. Only conversations between partners or close family qualify for this category, in which participants are linguistically most 'off-guard'.  All participants in a conversation have to fall into this category for the conversation to be classified as 'intimate'.

Socialising

This category implies the voluntary interaction between speakers that seek each other's company for the sake of interaction itself. The relationship between the speakers is usually marked by friendship and is thus not as close as that between speakers in the 'intimate' category.

Professional

This category refers to the relationship that holds between people who are interacting as part of their regular daily work. As such, this category only applies to interactions where all speakers are part of the professional context. Talk that is not work related but occurs between colleagues in the work-place has still been classified as 'professional' based on the observation that participants retain their professional relationship even when the topic of the conversation is not work related.

Transactional

This category embraces interactions in which the speakers usually do not previously know one another. The 'reason' for transactional conversations is usually related to a need on the part of the hearer or the speaker. As such, conversations aim to satisfy a particular transactional goal.

Pedagogic

This final category was set up in order to include any conversation in which the relationship between the speakers was defined by the pedagogic context. Thus a range of lectures and feedback sessions have been included. The emphasis has been on the speaker relationship rather than on the setting.

Each text has been further annotated with information about the speakers such as gender, age, occupation, education status of speakers, overall 'topic', and geographical location.

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Interaction Types

Apart from the context-type categories, distinctions have also been made within the corpus between texts that were predominantly collaborative versus those that were non-collaborative i.e. texts in which speakers give explanations and information or relate events and tell stories. A further distinction within the collaborative texts was made between 'collaborative idea' and 'collaborative task'.

• Collaborative Task

Social activities which cannot be performed with language alone.

• Collaborative Idea

Conversations in which the main goal is to exchange ideas.

• Information Provision

Conversations are marked by the uni-linear transfer of information from one speaker to the other interactants.

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The L-CIE Data

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