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American Speech 75.3 (2000) 301-303



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Taking Advantage of Technology

Language And Digital Technology:
Corpora, Contact, And Change

Boyd Davis, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

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We have already begun to see increased involvement of digital technology in language research. Over the next 25 years, we will see more, some of which we cannot yet envision. So far, there are two general kinds of interactions, one in which digital technology supports our study of language contact and change, and one in which the technology is the vehicle and perhaps an impetus for change, in its broadest sense.

An example of the first interaction is the expansion in the development and use of specialized corpora and of more sophisticated tools with which to array and analyze language patterns. A corpus is a body of spoken or written language texts, a systematically designed collection that is organized to focus on one or more aspects of language. Large corpora and databases, and their reproduction, are nothing new: lexicographers, theologians, and scribes have been working with various forms of them for a long time. What's different is their digitization, which provides an ever-improving quality of reproduction for sound, text, or image; the opportunity to package and integrate multiple media; and a size and format that make texts not only easy to preserve or transmit to others, but also speedy [End Page 301] to index, to tag for specific features, to concord and cross-reference--and thereby to identify patterns and their contexts. For example, when corpora include several languages, perhaps in parallel array, these digital Rosetta Stones may allow new insights into the languages being compared, translated, or taught. A learner corpus, such as the ICLE project (Granger 1998), with its collections of expository essays by second-language writers, has utility for translators, syntacticians, classroom teachers, and rhetoricians.

The Charlotte Narrative and Conversation Collection makes available the stories of a wide range of older people who were part of the history of Charlotte, North Carolina.1 Student interviewers can solicit perceptions about, and examples of good stories from, its digitized participants, currently numbering just over 500. What follows is taken from a concordance to a segment of the Narrative and Conversation Collection: the first 15 transcripts of stories told in 1999 by people in the region who were between 70 and 93 years old. Johnstone (1990) has illustrated a number of issues about regional expectations for good storytellers, such as the amount of detail a storyteller uses. Some details have greater impact: perhaps the use of intensifiers and emphatics plays a role in regional expectations for teller and for tale. My example here is the colloquial just got to:

And, and Mama told me, she said, "Ida," said, she said "You and Ben just got to come home."

This storyteller uses just to further intensify got to, which is part of what Myhill (1996) calls the strong obligation system (must, have to, got to) of modal verbs. Just got to is a usage both infrequent (3 of 207) and suggestive. It surfaces only within stories about hard times and family obligations, told exclusively by women originally from Southern towns. Born between 1906 and 1929, their use of this phrase is contemporaneous with attestations recorded in dictionaries: the earliest citations in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED2 1989) for just got to are 1909, 1910, and 1916; citations for gotta begin in 1911. Within their narratives, just got to marks the high point of a narrative episode, designed to reveal the speaker's evaluation of the events at the time and her rationale for action in subsequent narratives. A judicious sprinkling of different kinds of justs may be one reason we accept the authenticity of time and place in these stories.

A second way technology and language study are increasingly connected is in the way computer-mediated communication contextualizes and may even contribute to change in English usage, whether by the growing contact online of speakers across the world's languages or across different types of online interactions. For example, rhetorical questions...

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