Event: Linguistics Circle Seminar 2022
Date:  16 December 2022
Time: 12:00 - 13:00
Venue: Online event (via Zoom)
Speaker: Prof. Patrizia Paggio (University of Malta)

This event will be taking place in a virtual manner, therefore you are invited to access the Zoom link for this event as follows:

Meeting ID: 778 447 0068Passcode: 271457

MAMCO: the Maltese Multimodal Corpus - Prof. Patrizia Paggio

In this presentation Prof. Paggio will introduce the MAMCO corpus, which is the first multimodal resource involving Maltese conversational data. The corpus has been created by a group of researchers at the Institute of Linguistics and Language Technology at the University of Malta with the goal of providing a resource for the study of speech and gesture in conversational Maltese. It consists of 12 video recorded, transcribed and annotated first encounter dyadic conversations. After describing the corpus in more detail, and explaining the principles that have guided its development, Prof. Paggio will discuss three different studies that have looked at different aspects of spoken interaction based on data from the corpus.

The first one deals with overlaps in different communicative situations, and compares overlaps from the MAMCO conversations with overlaps in the task-oriented Map Task dialogues. It shows that speakers use overlaps to different degrees and with different functions in the two quite different situations. The second study focuses on complement fronting, a linguistic mechanism whereby a verbal complement is placed initially in a sentence, as in second year għad-ni (in second year, I am), and discusses the ways in which suprasegmental features, both in terms of prosody and gestures, underpin the different discourse functions of the resulting constructions in Maltese.

Finally, in the third study, the corpus was used to extract stimuli for a study of the way hand gestures interact with prosody in the perception of prominence by Maltese listeners. The study found that although seeing the speaker produce the gesture increases the perceived prominence of the co-occurring word, it does not so in a statistically significant way. The conclusion is that gestures may provide an additional but not necessary cue to prominence for the listener.

Further readings:

• Paggio, P. and A. Vella (2014). Overlaps in Maltese Conversational and Task Oriented Dialogues.
• In Paggio, P. and B. Wessel-Tolvig, eds. (2014) Proceedings from the 1st European Symposium on
• Multimodal Communication. University of Malta, Valletta, October 17–18, 2013, pp.55-64.
• Paggio, P., Galea, L. and S. Vella (2018) Prosodic and gestural marking of complement fronting in
• Maltese. In Paggio and Gatt (2018) Languages of Malta. Studies in Diversity Linguistics 18,
• Language Science Press, pp. 81-116.
• Paggio, P., Vella, A., Mitterer, H, and G. Attard (under review). Do Hand Gestures Increase
• Prominence in Naturally Produced Utterances? Submitted to Special Issue of the Journal
• Language and Cognition on Multimodal Prosody.