What we learn about language from Spoken Corpus Linguistics?

Abstract

Over the last few decades, the Spoken Corpus Linguistics (SCL) has achieved a great deal in terms of quantity and quality of works (O’Keeffe, McCarthy 2010). Enormous progress has been made in the last thirty years and the increment of multimodal corpora stimulates sophisticated investigations on the relationship between the verbal and non-verbal component of spoken communication (Knight 2011). The SCL is a very vital field of research, which is able to provide essential data and tools for the advancement of language knowledge. In this article I will focus on the contribution that SCL and the resulting data provide to general linguistics. In § 2, I discuss the contribution that the SCL gives to a better understanding of linguistic variation; in § 3, I show how the SCL can improve the descriptive adequacy of grammar; finally, § 4 is dedicated to the contribution that speech data can give to a better knowledge of the grammaticality of languages. Across the article I will use mainly data from Italian corpora, but widely validated by comparison with data from corpora of other languages.