Causality Across Languages (CAL): English
| Language | English |
| Depositor | Erika Bellingham |
| Affiliation | University at Buffalo |
| Location | United States |
| Collection ID | 0524 |
| Grant ID | |
| Funding Body | National Science Foundation |
| Collection Status | Collection online |
| Landing Page Handle | http://hdl.handle.net/2196/10dd8d0f-c2f9-4bbc-9d71-2fd03f2a474b |
Summary of the collection
This collection contains audio and video recordings collected from 13 English speakers as part of the Causality Across Languages project. CAL brings together an international team of researchers to investigate how speakers of different languages categorize causal chains for the purposes of describing them. It comprises four subprojects. The first of these is dedicated to the representation of causal relations in narrative discourses, with emphasis on universals and variation in underspecification and implicitness. The second subproject probes quantitatively and typologically the often hypothesized isomorphism between semantic and morphosyntactic complexity in verbal representations of causal chains. A third subproject investigates the universality of constraints on form-to-meaning mapping in descriptions of causal chains. The fourth and final subproject targets the cognitive representation of causality, searching for aspects of culture-specificity and possible linguistic reflexes.
Group represented
This collection represents speakers of American English. The speakers are all undergraduate or graduate students at the University at Buffalo.
Collection contents
The collection contains sessions recorded as part of the CAL subprojects (1) Causality in Discourse, and (2) Semantic Typology of Causality.
There are 13 sessions recorded as part of the Causality in Discourse subproject, each session representing one participant’s response to the discourse task. Sessions contain a compressed MP4 video recording, an extracted WAV file, and an ELAN file with a transcription of the recording.
Collection history
The data for this collection was collected by E Bellingham and S Evers in March-September 2016. All recordings were made at the University at Buffalo.
Acknowledgement and citation
Users of any part of the collection should acknowledge E. Bellingham as the data collector and researcher. The material presented here is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. BCS-153846 and BCS-1644657, ‘Causality Across Languages’; PI J. Bohnemeyer. Users should also acknowledge Juergen Bohnemeyer as the Primary Investigator of the Causality Across Languages project and the National Science Foundation for funding the research. Individual speakers do not need to be acknowledged when extracting linguistic examples from their speech.
To refer to any data from the collection, please cite as follows:
Bellingham, Erika. Forthcoming. Causality Across Languages (CAL): English. Endangered Languages Archive. Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/2196/00-0000-0000-0011-1022-A. Accessed on [insert date here].
