Integrating annotated spoken Maltese data into corpora of written Maltese

Abstract

Spoken data features to a lesser extent in corpora available for languages than do written data. This paper addresses this issue by presenting work carried out to date on the development of a corpus of spoken Maltese. It outlines the standards for the PRAAT annotation of Maltese data at the orthographic level, and reports on preliminary work on the annotation of Maltese prosody and development of ToBI-style standards for Maltese. Procedures being developed for exporting PRAAT TextGrid information for the purposes of incorporation into a predominantly written corpus of Maltese are then discussed. The paper also demonstrates how characteristics of speech notoriously difficult to deal with have been tackled and how the exported output from the PRAAT annotations can be enhanced through the representation also of phenomena, sometimes referred to as “normal disfluencies”, which include “filled pauses” and other vocalisations of a quasi-lexical nature having various functions of a discourse-management type such as “backchannelling”.