Abstract
Technologies for recording, editing, and analyzing audio-visual information have shed new light on language use, and we are now able to effectively utilize various corpora for research and education on spoken Japanese. However, these corpora have in common a problem of balance because our knowledge of the variation of spoken Japanese is still very limited and premature. In order to deepen our understanding of variation of speaking style, we have begun to construct a new type of corpus, the “My Funny Talk” corpus. This corpus is an audio-visual collection of talks about three minutes in length entered in a funny-talk tournament, with Japanese subtitles and English/French/Chinese translations. This corpus abounds in speaking styles barely addressed in hundreds of hours of standard spoken-language corpora. By using this corpus as a complement to previous corpora, we can learn about actual variations in Japanese speaking style. In this paper, we demonstrate the complementary efficiency of our corpus for better understanding real variety in speaking style, with a special focus on pitch and phonation. We conclude with discussion of two challenges sometimes raised regarding the usability of the MFT corpus, and resolve them by demonstrating how our MFT analysis strategies can effectively account for “dialects in the study of spoken language” and “technologies of synthesizing speech.”
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Notes
- 1.
Before the twentieth century, written language was generally viewed as superior to spoken language, as described by Izre’el (2005). Izre’el (ibid.) also pointed out that the linguistic focus on spoken language is still limited and partial, with phonetics and phonology as its center. Although it might possible to regard the view of priority of spoken language over written language as prevailing during the long history of philosophy since Socrates, I am not sure whether that tradition is really concerned with spoken/written distinction rather than langue/parole distinction.
- 2.
Paul Hopper says, “To start with discourse is not simply to use discourse data for the same projects that were previously carried out with invented sentences, but to face the prospect of beginning anew and finding new generalizations about the language, based on entire texts and contexts rather than convenient selections. It may even lead us to rethink our ideas about language itself.” [Hopper 1995: 140.]
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- 5.
This project is supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A), 23320087. http://www.speech-data.jp/kaken/
- 6.
“Media Bunka Suishin Kyougikai,” in Japanese.
- 7.
I think the readers probably noticed the quality of images is not so high. Let me explain about it. The low quality of images is connected with the basic conception of the “My Funny Talk” project, which is the theme of this paper. As I wrote earlier, one of the objects of this project is to share research data among researchers over the world via the internet. We lower the video quality and downsize the data volume in order to facilitate those researchers who have little to no research funding to watch and download the video easily.
- 8.
Labov, William. 1972. Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
- 9.
By using MRI, we are able to visually document various articulatory behaviors in the oral cavity and throat. Furthermore, instead of recording video images in real time, it is possible to construct video data by repeating the same utterance 96 times, using a recording that synchronizes the timing of imaging and speech using two types of trigger signals: a scan signal and a noise burst (Masaki et al. 1999, Honda 2006). All permissions have been secured for the use Figs. 6 and 7 for this paper.
- 10.
See υ-TALK and CHATR: http://fastnet.netsoc.ie/chatr/chatr2/e_tour/nutalk.html.
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Acknowledgements
I thank my colleagues, especially Nick Campbell, Akiko Tabata, Jumpei Kaneda, Kaori Ototake, Hiroaki Hatano, Li Cheng, and Akiko Mokhtari for extensive advice and for helping in many other ways. This work was partially supported by the Ministry of Education, Science, Sport, and Culture, Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A), 23242023.
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Sadanobu, T. (2018). The “My Funny Talk” Corpus and Speaking Style Variation in Japanese. In: Hebert, D. (eds) International Perspectives on Translation, Education and Innovation in Japanese and Korean Societies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68434-5_9
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