The Chinese subcorpus of LINDSEI: Corpus compilation, preliminary studies and future development

The Chinese subcorpus was one of the earliest components of LINDSEI compiled and studied. This presentation first introduces background information on the data and issues relating to its collection and transcription. Some of the issues are specific to Chinese learners while others are more general in nature and may apply to other subcorpora. One of the issues is how to work out a set of transcription conventions that are consistent and yet flexible enough to represent L1-specific features appropriately. Another concerns the significance of directions and prompts. Subtle variations, whether linguistic or non-linguistic, may elicit very different data. The second part of the presentation gives a summary on the preliminary studies done so far by members of the Chinese team. They cover areas such as pronunciation, cohesive devices, epistemic markers, verb collocations and so forth. The author’s previous work on person reference and her present PhD project on discourse competence are discussed in greater detail. The presentation concludes with a discussion of directions for future research and corpus development.