Genre markup of the Tomsk dialect corpus: from concept to implementation

Abstract

The relevance of the study is due to the fact that it has been conducted at the intersection of two scientific fields: corpus linguistics and communicative dialectology. The paper presents a comparative analysis of corpus practice based on the material of spoken language. Also, consideration is given to the process and results of creating a discursively annotated corpus of dialect speech with a size of more than 2 million tokens. Discursive markup implies the labeling of three parameters: topic, type, and genre of the text. The novelty of this research project is related to the fact that, for the first time, a large array of dialectal texts has been marked up according to intentional orientation: not only folklore but also speech genres have been annotated. The value of the new source is provided by the combination of archived data with current materials. A methodological advantage of the corpus is the possibility of combining qualitative and quantitative analysis. The paper describes the principles of implementing the genre marking in the Tomsk dialect corpus, with the factors influencing the composition of the genres of the dialect corpus revealed. The results make it possible to determine the quantitative ratio of different speech genres in dialectal communication. The observations are supported by examples from the spoken language of villagers. The accuracy of the conclusions is ensured by the reliance on quantitative data and a considerable amount of material (over 16 thousand genre fragments).