Collaborative Research: A syntactically annotated corpus of Appalachian English

该项目的目标是创建一个100万字的传统阿巴拉契亚语的在线语料库，该语料库将免费提供给学术界和公众。虽然阿巴拉契亚英语在社会上经常被污名化，但它在历史上是美国英语从英国起源发展起来的中心，该项目旨在为阿巴拉契亚英语的文化、历史和语言研究提供一个范围和公众可及性都前所未有的资源。该项目是基于该领域公认的权威迈克尔蒙哥马利教授现有的录音和抄本收集，它的目标包括将录音数字化，将数字化的声音文件与抄本对齐，并用详细的语法信息注释抄本。数字化录音将为后代保留这一宝贵的文化资源，并将数字化录音与转录本对齐，使研究人员能够通过搜索转录文本快速找到记录的单词和短语。语法注释将允许对特定于阿巴拉契亚英语或更普遍的美国本土语言的典型结构进行深入分析，以及将阿巴拉契亚英语与当代标准美国英语、其他本土英语以及该语言的早期阶段进行比较。由于语料库将是大型的，公开可用的，并且可以用标准计算工具在线搜索，它将促进可复制性，从而有助于提高语言研究的经验严谨性。 这些相同的属性也将使它有可能使用语料库作为教学工具，在高中和大学的水平。它也将成为创建其他英语变体的类似语料库的典范。总之，阿巴拉契亚英语注释语料库将加深我们对美国语言遗产的理解，并促进对区域语言和文化的科学了解。

The goal of this project is to create an online corpus of one million words of traditional Appalachian speech, which will be freely available to the scholarly community and to the public. Though often socially stigmatized, Appalachian English is historically central to the development of American English from its British origins, and the project aims to provide a resource unprecedented in scope and in public accessibility for cultural, historical, and linguistic research on the English of Appalachia.The project is based on an existing collection of recordings and transcripts by Prof. Michael Montgomery, a recognized authority in the field, and its goals include digitizing the recordings, aligning the digitized sound files with the transcripts, and annotating the transcripts with detailed grammatical information. Digitizing the recordings will preserve this valuable cultural resource for future generations, and aligning the digitized recordings with the transcripts will allow researchers to rapidly find recorded words and phrases by searching the transcribed text. The grammatical annotation will allow in-depth analyses of particular constructions that are specific to Appalachian English or typical of vernacular American speech more generally, as well as comparisons of Appalachian English with contemporary standard American English, with other vernacular Englishes, and with earlier stages of the language.Because the corpus will be large, publicly available, and searchable online with standard computational tools, it will foster replicability, thereby contributing to increased empirical rigor in linguistic research. These same properties will also make it possible to use the corpus as a teaching tool at the high school and college levels. It will also serve as a model for the creation of similar corpora of other varieties of English. In sum, the annotated corpus of Appalachian English will deepen our understanding of America's linguistic heritage and promote a scientifically informed appreciation of regional language and culture.