Systemic Functional Linguistics in the Digital Age - Sheena Gardner
15. The Role of Corpus Annotation in the SFL-CL Marriage: A Test Case on the EU Debt Crisis
Systemic Functional Linguistics in the Digital Age - Sheena Gardner
Sabrina Fusari [+]
University of Bologna
Sabrina Fusari is Researcher of English Linguistics at the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the University of Bologna, Italy. Her research in Systemic Functional Linguistics focuses on the use of electronic language corpora for the analysis of institutional and news registers, with particular focus on patterns of Transitivity.
Description
Although raw text corpora have been felt to be "inadequate for many of the questions Systemic Functional Linguistics asks" (Honnibal 2004: 7), annotation also creates problems, not only for its costs in terms of time and money (Wu 2009: 142), but also due to technical and philosophical issues. This paper will look at issues surrounding automatic versus manual annotation, and whether SFL corpus annotation is worthwhile. The results of a test on two taggers (UAM Corpus Tool and Halliday Center Tagger) will then be discussed.