engleski

Istrian Italophone and Croatophone Bilingual Corpus

Using corpora can be particularly useful for bilingual research since some features of bilingual interaction can hardly be accessed with more traditional methodologies (e.g. elici-tation tasks). The method of language sampling provides the resources for describing lan-guage interaction in a bilingual community and/or in bilingual situations (e.g. code- switching, amount of languages used, number of languages used, etc.). To capture these phenomena in genuine communication situations, such sampling should be as close as possible to spontaneous communication. Bilingual corpora have mostly been designed for natural language processing, for ex-ample for the development of machine interpretation or speech recognition. Bilingual cor-pora collected for the study of contact phenomena are sparser (but see, for example, BilingBank (in TalkBank - MacWhinney, 2007). Such corpora offer many advantages: public availability allows for easy replication of studies and cumulative progress as a re-search community builds up around the corpus (Mair 2009), while the tools developed within the field of corpus linguistics enable easy retrieval and analysis of information. The paper describes the methodological challenges for the corpus design of the Istrian Italophone and Croatophone Bilingual Corpus. The aim of the Corpus is to document the synchronic usage of Istrovenetian (a diatopic subvariety of Venetian and a longlasting lin- gua franca in Istria) and to aid the preservation of Istriot, an archaic pre- Venetian autoch-thonous Romance language that developed on the “regional” vulgar Latin substrate, listed by the UNESCO as an endangered language at serious risk of extinction. Within the CLARIN infrastructure, TalkBank is being used, as it provides relevant procedures for de-signing and analyzing bilingual corpora. Furthermore, it allows data sharing and enables easy access. Conversational corpora are still rare in TalkBank, so the Corpus will contrib-ute to BilingBank as a highly relevant and scientifically reliable resource for an interna-tionally established and active research community, providing a fundamental part of an in-terdisciplinary Humanities and Social Sciences research framework thus ensuring the sus-tainability of the usage of TalkBank and the CLARIN infrastructure. The impact of the re-search of communities with societal bilingualism will contribute to the growing body of re-search on bilingualism and multilingualism, especially regarding topics of language domi-nance, language attrition and loss, interference and code-switching etc.

bilingual community, language samples, corpus, Istria

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