Functions of the lecture The Engineering Lecture Corpus

Functions of the lecture: The Engineering Lecture Corpus (ELC) (PART ONE) Siân Alsop Coventry University | alsops@uni. coventry. ac. uk www. coventry. ac. uk/elc

What and why? Aim � To identify the main linguistic and pragmatic features which an Engineering lecture contains Why � � Lectures are increasingly given in English medium across the world Growing need to understand how lectures function – for native and non-native speakers delivering/receiving lectures in English How � Using the Engineering Lecture Corpus (ELC) www. coventry. ac. uk/elc

Engineering Lecture Corpus (ELC) A growing cross-cultural corpus of spoken academic English � Authentic examples – search the website � Marked up up for pragmatic functions � � pragmatic functions (as well as standard TEI): www. coventry. ac. uk/elc

Pragmatic markup: ELC vs. MICASE Humour was deemed too complicated to include in the final MICASE tagset - its complexities are shown by the numerous attributes in the ELC tagset Is there a connection? Story and Defining elements are included in all tagsets Prayer is unique to the Malaysian component Summary is important to the ELC markup www. coventry. ac. uk/elc

Why tag pragmatically? Benefits Pitfalls • Aids recovery of original context – especially where returning to the original video file to interpret non-verbal indicators is unfeasible • More subjective than other forms of markup (e. g. at the level of discourse or semantics) • Helps to build a model that contributes to the TEI system and can also be integrated into other similar resources • Can potentially be aligned with recorded data • Subjectivity of process potentially confounded by its labour-intensive nature • Current lack of consistency in tagsets makes comparison - e. g. analysis across corpora - difficult (although TEI markup has the potential to include pragmatic information) www. coventry. ac. uk/elc