The goal of this paper is to provide an overview of the structure and contents of the soon-to-be available ORAL corpus, which combines previously published corpora (ORAL2006, ORAL2008 and ORAL2013) with newly transcribed material into a single conveniently accessible and more richly annotated resource, about 6 million running words in length. The recordings and corresponding transcripts span a decade between 2002 and 2011; most of them capture interactions of mutually well-acquainted speakers, in informal situations and natural settings. The corpus is complemented by amarginal portion of more formal data, mostly public talks. It is tagged and lemmatized, and an effort was made to adapt existing tools (targeted at written language) to yield better results on spoken data. We hope the availability of such a resource will spawn further discussions on the morphological and syntactic analysis of spoken language, perhaps resulting in more radical departures in the future from the part-of-speech classification inherited from the linguistic analysis of written language.
In this article, we introduce the Prague Dependency Treebank of Spoken Czech. The syntactic and semantic annotation of this corpus has led to the expansion of PDT-Vallex, a valency lexicon of Czech verbs, which has previously been linked only to the annotation of written texts. The expansion of the lexicon consisted of several steps: (i) new verbs were added to the lexicon; (ii) new meanings and new valency frames were added to verbs that had already been included in the lexicon; valency frames that had already been part of the lexicon were enriched with (iii) new participants (actants) and (iv) new formal realizations of participants (actants). All the above mentioned enrichments are (a) unmarked and based only on the addition of a new verb, a new meaning, a new participant (actant) or a new form, however, (b) some of them are influenced by the typical characteristics of spoken language. It would be almost impossible to find some of the verbs, some of the meanings, participants or forms in a written text. We believe that verbs in spoken language tend to exhibit different valency behavior than verbs in written texts. In this article we attempt to draw more general conclusions on the valency behavior of verbs in spoken language.