Spoken Chinese Corpora: Construction and Sample Applications in Research and Language Pedagogy

Abstract

While there is much progress in corpus linguistics and its applications, as is especially the case with English, Chinese lags behind in this area. There is little in the way of integrating corpus based research and language teaching in the field of Chinese applied linguistics. This paper focuses on the spoken language corpus and its applications, with exemplifications from discourse prosody, lexico-grammar, and discourse pragmatics. It will be shown that there is much to be gained by applying spoken corpora in both research and teaching pedagogy.