scholarly journals Morphosyntactic annotation of CHILDES transcripts

2010 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 705-729 ◽  
Author(s):  
KENJI SAGAE ◽  
ERIC DAVIS ◽  
ALON LAVIE ◽  
BRIAN MACWHINNEY ◽  
SHULY WINTNER
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Gold Standard ◽  
Child Language ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Accurate Data ◽  
Grammatical Relations ◽  
Linguistic Annotation ◽  
Grammatical Relation ◽  
Child Language Acquisition ◽  
Dependency Structures

ABSTRACTCorpora of child language are essential for research in child language acquisition and psycholinguistics. Linguistic annotation of the corpora provides researchers with better means for exploring the development of grammatical constructions and their usage. We describe a project whose goal is to annotate the English section of the CHILDES database with grammatical relations in the form of labeled dependency structures. We have produced a corpus of over 18,800 utterances (approximately 65,000 words) with manually curated gold-standard grammatical relation annotations. Using this corpus, we have developed a highly accurate data-driven parser for the English CHILDES data, which we used to automatically annotate the remainder of the English section of CHILDES. We have also extended the parser to Spanish, and are currently working on supporting more languages. The parser and the manually and automatically annotated data are freely available for research purposes.

scholarly journals Acquisition, Loss and Innovation in Chuquisaca Quechua—What Happened to Evidential Marking?

Languages ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 76
Author(s):  
Susan E. Kalt
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Child Language ◽  
Epistemic Modality ◽  
Reverse Order ◽  
Related Variety ◽  
Child Language Acquisition ◽  
Statistical Studies ◽  
L1 And L2

Variation among closely related languages may reveal the inner workings of language acquisition, loss and innovation. This study of the existing literature and of selected interviews from recent narrative corpora compares the marking of evidentiality and epistemic modality in Chuquisaca, Bolivian Quechua with its closely related variety in Cuzco, Peru and investigates three hypotheses: that morpho-syntactic attrition proceeds in reverse order of child language acquisition, that convergence characterizes the emergence of grammatical forms different from L1 and L2 in contact situations, and that the Quechua languages are undergoing typological shift toward more isolating morphology. It appears that reportive -sis disappeared first in Bolivia, with eyewitness/validator -min retaining only the validator function. This finding seems to concord with reverse acquisition since it has previously been claimed that epistemic marking is acquired earlier than evidential marking in Cuzco. Meanwhile, Spanish and Quechua in nearby Cochabamba are claimed to mark reportive evidentiality via freestanding verbs of saying. I explore the reportive use of ñiy ‘to say’ in Chuquisaca as compared to Cochabamba and Cuzco and suggest the need for comparative statistical studies of evidential and epistemic marking in Southern Quechua.

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