The lecture is co-presented with the Linguistics Seminars and Grounding Human-Centred Ai on Embodied Multimodal Interaction Eutopia Connected Community.
Abstract
Based on the unitary approach to language, which views speech and writing as two ends of a continuum that should be described as a whole, the past three decades have seen a surge in spoken language research aimed at capturing speech-specific linguistic phenomena that have been overlooked or insufficiently addressed by traditional grammatical frameworks. Although spoken communication exhibits idiosyncrasies on various levels of linguistic description due to the specific circumstances of its production, its most pronounced differences emerge in syntactic patterns, where features such as disfluencies and ellipsis shape its structure in ways rarely found in writing.
The rise of spoken treebanks — morphosyntactically annotated transcriptions of dialogue and other spoken interactions — has opened new avenues for systematically studying these differences. Drawing on insights from the SPOT project, which investigates the syntactic features of spoken Slovene, this talk presents a bottom-up, data-driven approach to analyzing spoken language by extracting and comparing syntactic patterns across corpora. Specifically, I will share our experience in creating a manually annotated spoken language treebank, developing a new method for systematic, bottom-up treebank comparison, and applying it to a cross-linguistic study of syntactic differences between speech and writing.
This approach not only deepens our understanding of speech-specific syntactic patterns but also demonstrates the broader potential of a fully inductive, treebank-driven analysis for studying structural variation across languages, registers, and genres.
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