It is commonly claimed that (Anglo-)Australians place great importance on “not taking oneself too seriously” (Goddard 2006, 2007; Olivieri 2003; Peeters 2004; Peters 2007; Stollznow 2004). One correlate of such claims in spoken communication is the existence of speech practices such as jocular mockery, teasing, or more colloquially, taking the piss (Haugh 2008). The question of whether such speech practices can be claimed to be robust across a range of different contexts in Australian English, however, requires recourse to large tracts of conversational data. Corpus-based pragmatics thus has considerable potential to ground the study of speech practices across languages and sociocultural groups in empirically valid data sets (Adolphs 2008; Prodromou 2008; Romero-Trillo in press; Rühlemann 2007; Sanderson 2008; Schmidt 2007). One issue facing researchers making recourse to corpus data in pragmatics, however, is the question of what kind of data is required to properly analyse various speech practices in light of recent developments in discourse analysis that utilise multimodal data (Baldry and Thibault 2006; Machin 2007; Norris 2004). More specifically, what are the relative advantages and disadvantages of data which includes paralinguistic information (such as pausing, intonation, speed etc.) in addition to what is traditionally represented in a spoken corpus, namely what is said with minimal paralinguistic information (cf. British National Corpus, American National Corpus). The relative advantages and disadvantages of expanding the scope of corpus data to include visual aspects of communication (such as gaze, facial expressions, gesture, and stance), where the data collected allows, also needs to be considered. Through an analysis in this presentation of a specific speech practice in Australian English, namely jocular mockery, teasing, or more colloquially, taking the piss (Haugh 2008), it is suggested we may gain insight into the analytical import of different levels of detail in representing audio(visual) data, and thus build a solid empirical basis for making subsequent decisions in designing the Australian National Corpus.
Authors: Michael Haugh
Event: SF08: Designing the Australian National Corpus Workshop