Advances in Corpus-based Contrastive Linguistics - Studies in honour of Stig Johansson

Cohesive substitution in English and German 205

Table 1. GECCo subcorpora

SUBCORPORA REGISTERS

Imported from CroCo

EO-WRITTEN

GO-WRITTEN

ETRANS-WRITTEN

GTRANS-WRITTEN

FICTION, ESSAY,

INSTR, POPSCI,

SHARE, SPEECH,

TOU, WEB

New collection

EO-SPOKEN

GO-SPOKEN

INTERVIEW, ACADEMIC,

FORUM, TALKSHOW

The written subcorpora contain originals and translations and are a collection
of texts from eight different registers: fictional texts, political essays, instruction
manuals, popular-scientific texts, letters to shareholders, prepared speeches, tour-
ism leaflets and websites. Second, a new collection of two spoken subcorpora is
currently being established: EO-SPOKEN (English originals) and GO-SPOKEN
(German originals), consisting of texts in four different registers. They include
monologic and dialogic texts in order to capture differences resulting from this
dichotomy:

1. INTERVIEW: Interview transcriptions from the ELISA corpus (Braun 2006)
   and the Backbone corpus (Kohn 2011) for English, and the Backbone corpus
   for German.


2. ACADEMIC: Lectures and student presentations from the MICASE corpus
   for English (Simpson et al. 2002). For German, lectures from various disci-
   plines were recorded at the Saarland University and are currently being tran-
   scribed and annotated.


3. FORUM: Texts taken from various English and German internet forums are
   currently being annotated.


4. TALKSHOW: Video files taken from internet sites of various English and
   German TV channels are currently being transcribed and annotated.

With this corpus constellation we hope to identify contrasts in frequency and
function of cohesive devices along the written vs. spoken plane. We may also be
able to show that the cohesive features traced reflect a continuum from written to
spoken rather than a binary divide. Note however, that only the spoken register
INTERVIEW could be analyzed in the present paper.