The term language corpus is used to mean a number of
rather different things. It may refer simply to any collection of
linguistic data (written, spoken, or a mixture of the two), although
many practitioners prefer to reserve it for collections which have
been organized or collected with a particular end in view, generally to
characterize a particular state or variety of one or more languages.
Because opinions as to the best method of achieving this goal differ,
various subcategories of corpora have also been identified. For our
purposes however, the distinguishing characteristic of a corpus is that
its components have been selected or structured according to some
conscious set of design criteria.
These design criteria may be very simple and undemanding, or very
sophisticated. A corpus may be intended to represent (in the
statistical sense) a particular linguistic variety or sublanguage, or it
may be intended to represent all aspects of some assumed
core language. A corpus may be made up
of whole texts or of fragments or text samples. It may be a
closed corpus, or an open or
monitor corpus, the composition of which may change
over time. However, since an open corpus is of necessity finite at any
particular point in time, the only likely effect of its expansibility
from the encoding point of view may be some increased difficulty in
maintaining consistent encoding practices (see further section ). For simplicity, therefore, our discussion largely
concerns ways of encoding closed corpora, regarded as single but
composite texts.
Language corpora are regarded by these Guidelines as
composite texts rather than unitary texts
(on this distinction, see chapter ).
This is because although
each discrete sample of language in a corpus clearly has a claim to be
considered as a text in its own right, it is also regarded as a
subdivision of some larger object, if only for convenience of analysis.
Corpora share a number of characteristics with other types of composite
texts, including anthologies and collections. Most notably, different
components of composite texts may exhibit different structural
properties (for example, some may be composed of verse, and others of
prose), thus potentially requiring elements from different TEI bases.
Composite texts are thus especially likely to require the techniques for
combining base tag sets described in section .
Aside from these high-level structural differences, and possibly
differences of scale, the encoding of language corpora and the encoding
of individual texts present identical sets of problems. Any of the
encoding techniques and elements presented in other chapters of these
Guidelines may therefore prove relevant to some aspect of corpus
encoding and may be used in corpora. However, we do not repeat here the
discusssion of such fundamental matters as the representation of
multiple character sets (see chapter ); nor attempt to
summarize the variety of elements provided for encoding basic structural
features such as quoted or highlighted phrases, cross references, lists,
notes, editorial changes and reference systems (see chapter ). In addition to these general purpose elements, these
Guidelines offer a range of more specialized sets of tags which may be
of use in certain specialized corpora, for example those consisting
primarily of verse (chapter ), drama (chapter ), transcriptions of spoken text (chapter ),
etc. Chapter should be reviewed for details of how
these and other components of the Guidelines should be tailored to
create a document type definition appropriate to a given application.
In sum, it should not be asssumed that only the matters specifically
addressed in this chapter are of importance for corpus creators.
This chapter does however include some other material
relevant to corpora and corpus-building, for which no other location
appeared suitable. It begins with a review of the distinction between
unitary and composite texts, and of the different methods provided by
these Guidelines for representing composite texts of different kinds
(section ). Section describes a
set of additional header elements provided for the documentation of
contextual information, of importance largely though not exclusively to
language corpora. This is the additional tag set for language corpora
proper. Section discusses a mechanism by which
individual parts of the TEI Header may be associated with different
parts of a TEI-conformant text. Section reviews
various methods of providing linguistic annotation in corpora, with some
specific examples of relevance to current practice in corpus
linguistics. Finally, section provides some general
recommendations about the use of these Guidelines in the building of
large corpora.
Varieties of Composite Text
Both unitary and composite texts may be encoded using these
Guidelines; composite texts, including corpora, will typically make use
of the following tags for their top-level organization.
contains the whole of a TEI encoded corpus, comprising a
single corpus header and one or more TEI.2 elements, each
containing
a single text header and a text.contains a single TEI-conformant document, comprising a
TEI header and a text, either in isolation or as part of a
teiCorpus element.supplies the descriptive and declarative information making
up an
electronic title page prefixed to every
TEI-conformant text.
Attributes include:
specifies the kind of document to which the header is
attached.
Legal values are:
the header is attached to a single text.the header is attached to a corpus.indicates whether the header is new or has been
substantially revised.
Sample values include:
the header is a new header.the header is an update (has been revised).identifies the creator of the TEI Header.indicates when the first version of the header was created.indicates when the current version of the header was
created.contains a single text of any kind, whether unitary or
composite, for example a poem or drama, a collection of
essays, a novel,
a dictionary, or a corpus sample.contains the body of a composite text, grouping together a
sequence of distinct texts (or groups of such texts) which
are regarded
as a unit for some purpose, for example the
collected works of an
author, a sequence of prose essays,
etc.
Full descriptions of these may be found in chapter (for
TEI.corpus.2 and TEI.2), chapter (for
teiHeader), and chapter (for text and
group); this section discusses their application to composite
texts in particular.
In these Guidelines, the word text refers to any stretch
of discourse, whether complete or incomplete, unitary or composite,
which the encoder chooses (perhaps merely for purposes of analytic
convenience) to regard as a unit. The term composite text
refers to texts within which other texts appear; the following common
cases may be distinguished:
language corpora
collections or anthologies
poem cycles and epistolary works (novels or essays written
in the form of collections or series of letters)
otherwise unitary texts, within which one or more subordinate
texts are embedded
The tags listed above may be combined to encode each of these
varieties of composite text in different ways.
In corpora, the component samples are clearly distinct texts, but the
systematic collection, standardized preparation, and common markup of
the corpus often make it useful to treat the entire corpus as a unit,
too. Some corpora may become so well established as to be regarded as
texts in their own right; the Brown and LOB corpora are now close to
achieving this status.
The TEI.corpus.2 element is intended for the encoding of
language corpora, though it may also be useful in encoding newspapers,
electronic anthologies, and other disparate collections of material.
The individual samples in the corpus are encoded as separate
TEI.2 elements, and the entire corpus is enclosed in a
TEI.corpus.2 element. Each sample has the usual structure for
a TEI.2 document, comprising a teiHeader followed by a
text element. The corpus, too, has a corpus-level
teiHeader element, in which the corpus as a whole, and encoding
practices common to multiple samples may be described. The overall
structure of a TEI-conformant corpus is thus:
...
... ... ... ...
]]>
Header information which relates to the whole corpus rather than to
individual components of it should be factored out and included in the
teiHeader element prefixed to the whole. This two-level
structure allows for contextual information to be specified at the
corpus level, at the individual text level, or at both. Discussion of
the kinds of information which may thus be specified is provided below,
in section , as well as in chapter . Information of this type should in general be specified
only once: a variety of methods are provided for associating it with
individual components of a corpus, as further described in section .
In some cases, the design of a corpus is reflected in its internal
structure. For example, a corpus of newspaper extracts might be
arranged to combine all stories of one type (reportage, editorial,
reviews, etc.) into some higher-level grouping, possibly with sub-groups
for date, region, etc. The TEI.corpus.2 element provides no
direct support for reflecting such internal corpus structure in the
markup: it treats the corpus as an undifferentiated series of
components, each tagged TEI.2.
If it is essential to reflect a single permanent organization of a
corpus into sub- and sub-sub-corpora, then the corpus or the high-level
subcorpora may be encoded as composite texts, using the group
element described below and in section . The
mechanisms for corpus characterization described in this chapter,
however, are designed to reduce the need to do this. Useful groupings
of components may easily be expressed using the text classification and
identification elements described in section ,
and those for associating declarations with corpus components described
in section . These methods also allow several
different methods of text grouping to co-exist, each to be used as
needed at different times. This helps minimize the danger of
cross-classification and mis-classification of samples, and helps
improve the flexibility with which parts of a corpus may be
characterized for different applications.
Anthologies and collections are often treated as texts in their own
right, if only for historical reasons. In conventional publishing, at
least, anthologies are published as units, with single editorial
responsibility and common front and back matter which may need to be
included in their electronic encodings. The texts collected in the
anthology, of course, may also need to identifiable as distinct
individual objects for study.
Poem cycles, epistolary novels, and epistolary essays differ from
anthologies in that they are often written as single works, by single
authors, for single occasions; nevertheless, it can be useful to treat
their constituent parts as individual texts, as well as the cycle
itself. Structurally, therefore, they may be treated in the same way
as anthologies: in both cases, the body of the text is composed
largely of other texts.
The group element is provided to simplify the encoding of
collections, anthologies, and cyclic works; as noted above, the
group element can also be used to record the potentially
complex internal structure of language corpora. For full description,
see chapter .
Some composite texts, finally, are neither corpora, nor anthologies,
nor cyclic works: they are otherwise unitary texts within which other
texts are embedded. In general, they may be treated in the same way as
unitary texts, using the normal TEI.2 and
body elements. The embedded text itself may be encoded using
the text element, which may occur within quotations or between
paragraphs or other chunk-level elements inside the sections of a larger
text. For further discussion, see chapter .
All composite texts share the characteristic that their different
component texts may be of structurally similar or dissimilar types. If
all component texts may all be encoded using the same base tag set,
then no problem arises. If however they require
different base tag sets, then either the general or the mixed base tag
set must be used, in addition to all relevant base tag sets. This
process is described in more detail in section .
Contextual Information
Contextual information is of particular importance for collections
or corpora composed of samples from a variety of different kinds of
text. Examples of such contextual information include: the age, sex
and geographical origins of participants in a language interaction, or
their socio-economic status; the cost and publication data of a
newspaper; the topic, register or factuality of an extract from a
textbook. Such information may be of the first importance, whether as
an organizing principle in creating a corpus (for example, to ensure
that the range of values in such a parameter is evenly represented
throughout the corpus, or represented proportionately to the population
being sampled), or as a selection criterion in analysing the corpus
(for example, to investigate the language usage of some particular
vector of social characteristics).
Such contextual information is potentially of equal importance for
unitary texts, and these Guidelines accordingly make no particular
distinction between the kinds of information which should be gathered
for unitary and for composite texts. In either case, the information
should be recorded in the appropriate section of a TEI Header, as
described in chapter . In the case of language corpora,
such information may be gathered together in the overall corpus header,
or split across all the component texts of a corpus, in their individual
headers, or divided between the two. The association between an
individual corpus text and the contextual information applicable to it
may be made in a number of ways, as further discussed in section below.
Chapter , which should be read in conjunction with
the present section, describes in full the range of elements available
for the encoding of information relating to the electronic file itself,
for example its bibliographic description and those of the source or
sources from which it was derived (see section );
information about the encoding practices followed with the corpus, for
example its design principles, editorial practices, reference system
etc. (see section ); more detailed descriptive
information about the creation and content of the corpus, such as the
languages used within it and any descriptive classification system used
(see section ); and version information documenting any
changes made in the electronic text (see section ).
In addition to the elements defined by chapter ,
several other elements can be used in the TEI header if the additional
tag set defined by this chapter is invoked. These additional tags make
it possible to characterize the social or other situation within which a
language interaction takes place or is experienced, the physical setting
of a language interaction, and the participants in it. Though this
information may be relevant to, and provided for, unitary texts as well
as for collections or corpora, it is more often recorded for the
components of systematically developed corpora than for isolated texts,
and thus the additional tag set is referred to as being for language
corpora. Included in this tag set are the following elements:
provides a description of a text in terms of its
situational parameters.describes the identifiable speakers, voices or other
participants
in a linguistic interaction. describes the setting or settings within which a language
interaction takes place, either as a prose description or
as a
series of setting elements.
These elements form an optional extension to the profileDesc,
defined in section and are further described in the
remainder of this section. They are formally defined as follows:
]]>
The additional tag set for language corpora will be invoked, thus
enabling the use of these elements, if a parameter entity called
TEI.corpus is declared with the value INCLUDE, somewhere within the DTD subset. If the
document is structured as a TEI corpus (that is, using the
TEI.corpus.2 element), its document type declaration will
resemble this:
]>
]]>
The Text Description
The textDesc element provides a full description of the
situation within which a text was produced or experienced, and thus
characterizes it in a way relatively independent of any a
priori theory of text-types. It is provided as an alternative
or a supplement to the common use of descriptive taxonomies used to
categorize texts, which is fully described in section , and section . The description is
organized as a set of values and optional prose descriptions for the
following eight situational parameters, each represented by
one of the following eight elements:
describes the medium or channel by which a text is
delivered or
experienced. For a written text, this might
be print, manuscript, e-mail, etc.;
for a spoken one,
radio, telephone, face-to-face, etc.
Attributes include:
specifies the mode of this channel with respect to speech
and writing.
Legal values are:
spokenwrittenspoken to be written (e.g. dictation)written to be spoken (e.g. a script)mixed modesunknown or inapplicabledescribes the internal composition of a text or text
sample,
for example
as fragmentary, complete, etc.
Attributes include:
specifies how the text was constituted.
Legal values are:
a single complete texta text made by combining several smaller items, each
individually completea text made by combining several smaller, not necessarily
complete, itemscomposition unknown or unspecifieddescribes the nature and extent of indebtedness or
derivativeness
of this text with respect to others.
Attributes include:
categorizes the derivation of the text.
Sample values include:
text is originaltext is a revision of some other texttext is a translation of some other texttext is an abridged version of some other texttext is plagiarized from some other texttext has no obvious source but is one of a number derived
from some common ancestordescribes the most important social context in which the
text was
realized or for which it is intended, for example
private vs. public,
education, religion, etc.
Attributes include:
categorizes the domain of use.
Sample values include:
art and entertainmentdomestic and privatereligious and ceremonialbusiness and work placeeducationgovernment and lawother forms of public contextdescribes the extent to which the text may be regarded as
imaginative or non-imaginative, that is, as describing a
fictional
or a non-fictional world.
Attributes include:
categorizes the factuality of the text.
Legal values are:
the text is to be regarded as entirely imaginativethe text is to be regarded as entirely informative or
factualthe text contains a mixture of fact and fictionthe fiction/fact distinction is not regarded as helpful or
appropriate to this textdescribes the extent, cardinality and nature of any
interaction
among those producing and experiencing the
text, for example in the
form of response or interjection,
commentary etc.
Attributes include:
specifies whether or not there is any interaction between
active and passive participants in the text.
Legal values are:
no interaction of any kind, e.g. a monologuesome degree of interaction, e.g. a monologue with set
responsescomplete interaction, e.g. a face to face conversationthis parameter is inappropriate or inapplicable in this
casespecifies the number of active participants (or
addressors) producing parts of the text.
Legal values are:
a single addressormany addressorsa corporate addressornumber of addressors unknown or unspecifiablespecifies the number of passive participants (or
addressees) to whom a text is directed or in
whose presence it is created or performed.
Suggested values include:
text is addressed to the originator e.g. a diarytext is addressed to one other person e.g. a personal
lettertext is addressed to a countable number of others e.g. a
conversation in which all participants are identifiedtext is addressed to an undefined but fixed number of
participants e.g. a lecturetext is addressed to an undefined and indeterminately large
number e.g. a published bookdescribes the extent to which a text may be regarded as
prepared or spontaneous.
Attributes include:
a keyword characterizing the type of preparedness.
Sample values include:
spontaneous or unpreparedfollows a scriptfollows a predefined set of conventionspolished or revised before presentationcharacterizes a single purpose or communicative function of
the
text.
Attributes include:
specifies a particular kind of purpose.
Suggested values include:
didactic, advertising, propaganda, etc.self expression, confessional, etc.convey information, educate, etc.amuse, entertain, etc.specifies the extent to which this purpose predominates.
Legal values are:
this purpose is predominantthis purpose is intermediatethis purpose is weakextent unknown
A TEI-conformant text description contains each of the above
elements, supplied in the order specified. Except for the
purpose element, which may be repeated to indicate multiple
purposes, no element may appear more than once within a single text
description. Each element may be empty, or may contain a brief
qualification or more detailed description of the value expressed by
its attributes. It should be noted that some texts, in particular
literary ones, may resist unambiguous classification in some of these
dimensions; in such cases, the situational parameter in question
should be given the content not applicable or an equivalent
phrase.
Texts may be described along many dimensions, according to many
different taxonomies. No generally accepted consensus as to how such
taxonomies should be defined has yet emerged, despite the best efforts
of many corpus linguists, text linguists, sociolinguists,
rhetoricians, and literary theorists over the years. Rather than
attempting the task of proposing a single taxonomy of
text-types (or the equally impossible one of enumerating
all those which have been proposed previously), the closed set of
situational parameters described above can be used in
combination to supply useful distinguishing descriptive features of
individual texts, without insisting on a system of discrete high-level
text-types. Such text-types may however be used in combination with
the parameters proposed here, with the advantage that the internal
structure of each such text-type can be specified in terms of the
parameters proposed. This approach has the following analytical
advantages:Schemes similar to that proposed here were developed
in the 1960s and 1970s by researchers such as Hymes, Halliday, and
Crystal and Davy, but have rarely been implemented; one notable
exception being the pioneering work on the Helsinki Diachronic Corpus
of English, on which see M. Kytö and
M. Rissanen,The Helsinki Corpus of English
Texts, in Corpus Linguistics: hard and soft,
ed. M. Kytö, O. Ihalainen, and M. Rissanen
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988). it enables a relatively continuous characterization of texts (in
contrast to discrete categories based on type or topic)
it enables meaningful comparisons across corpora
it allows analysts to build and compare their own text-types
based on the particular parameters of interest to them
it is equally applicable to spoken and written texts
Two alternative approaches to the use of these parameters are
supported by these Guidelines. One is to use pre-existing taxonomies
such as those used in subject classification or other types of text
categorization.
Such taxonomies may also be appropriate for the description of the
topics addressed by particular texts. Elements for this purpose are
described in section , and elements for defining or
declaring such classification schemes in section . A
second approach is to develop an application-specific set of
feature structures and an associated feature system
declaration, as described in chapters and .
Where the organizing principles of a corpus or collection so permit,
it may be convenient to regard a particular set of values for the
situational parameters listed in this section as forming a
text-type in its own right; this may also be useful where
the same set of values applies to several texts within a corpus. In
such a case, the set of text-types so defined should be regarded as a
taxonomy. The mechanisms described in section may be used to define hierarchic taxonomies of such
text-types, provided that the catDesc component of the
category element contains a textDesc element rather
than a prose description. Particular texts may then be associated with
such definitions using the mechanisms described in sections .
Using these situational parameters, an informal domestic
conversation might be characterized as follows:
informal face-to-face conversationeach text represents a continuously
recorded interaction among the specified participants
plans for coming week, local affairsmostly factual, some jokes
]]>
The following example demonstrates how the same situational
parameters might be used to characterize a novel:
print; part issues
]]>
The formal declarations for these elements are given below:
]]>
The Participants Description
The particDesc element in the profileDesc element
provides additional information about the participants in a spoken text
or, where this is judged appropriate, the persons named or depicted in a
written text. Individual speakers or groups of speakers may be named or
identified by a code which can then be used elsewhere within the encoded
text, for example as the value of a who attribute.
Demographic and descriptive information may be supplied about their
individual characteristics and the relationships between them.
It should be noted that although the terms speaker or
participant are used throughout this section, it is
intended that the same mechanisms may be used to characterize fictional
personæ or voices within a written text, except
where otherwise stated. For the purposes of analysis of language usage,
the information specified here should be equally applicable to written
and spoken texts.
The element particDesc contains one or more
person or personGrp elements, followed by an
optional particLinks element, as described below:
describes a single participant in a language interaction.
Attributes include:
specifies the role of this participant in the group.specifies the sex of the participant.
Sample values include:
malefemaleunknown or inapplicablespecifies the age group to which the participant belongs.describes a group of individuals treated as a single person
for
analytic purposes.
Attributes include:
specifies the role of this group of participants in the
interaction.specifies the sex of the participant group.
Sample values include:
malefemaleunknownmixedspecifies the age group of the participants.specifies the size or approximate size of the group.describes the relationships or social links existing
between
participants in a linguistic interaction.
Both person and personGrp elements have the same
substructure. This may be a prose description, or, more formally, a
series of specialized subelements providing more specific details.
Such details will vary enormously for different kinds of analysis; the
set of demographic characteristics presented here as sub-elements
should therefore be regarded as providing only an indication of the
kinds of descriptive information which have been found to be generally
useful, for example in socio-linguistics. Users of these Guidelines
are free to extend or modify this set of demographic characteristics,
by redefining the parameter entity m.demographics,
associated with the class demographics, as further
described in chapter . Where well-known
classification schemes exist, e.g. for socio-economic class or
occupation, these should be used and may be documented in the same way
as for text classification (see section )
The following elements are the default members of the class
demographics:
contains information about a person's birth, such as its
date
and place.
Attributes include:
specifies the date of birth in an ISO standard form
(yyyy-mm-dd).specifies the first language of a participant.contains an informal description of a person's competence
in
different languages, dialects, etc.describes a person's present or past places of residence.contains a brief prose description of the
educational
background of a participant.contains an informal description of a person's present
or
past affiliation with some
organization, for example an
employer or sponsor.contains an informal description of a person's trade,
profession or occupation.
Attributes include:
identifies the classification system or taxonomy in use by
supplying the identifier of a taxonomy element
elsewhere in the header.identifies an occupation code defined within the
classification system or taxonomy defined by the
source attribute.contains an informal description of a person's perceived
social or
economic status.
Attributes include:
identifies the classification system or taxonomy in use.identifies a status code defined within the classification
system or taxonomy defined by the source
attribute.
For example, an individual might be described informally by the
following person element:
Female informant, well-educated, born in Shropshire
UK, 12 Jan 1950, of unknown occupation.
Speaks French fluently. Socio-Economic status B2
in the PEP classification scheme.
]]>
Provided that the PEP classification scheme has been defined
elsewhere in the heading (as a taxonomy element within the
textClass element; see ), the same individual
might more formally be described as follows:
12 Jan 1950Shropshire, UKEnglishFrenchLong term resident of HullUniversity postgraduateUnknown
]]>
Dates and names of persons or places, if included in the prose
description, may be encoded using either the general purpose
date, name or rs elements discussed in
section , or the more specialised and detailed
elements provided by chapter . In the latter case, the
additional tag set for names and dates must be enabled together with
that for language corpora.
An identified character in a drama or a novel might be defined using
a subset of the same tags as follows:It is particularly useful to
define participants in a dramatic text in this way, since it enables the
who attribute to be used to link sp elements to
definitions for their speakers; see further section .
Emma Woodhouse
]]>
As noted above, the particLinks element is used to document
personal or social relationships between individual participants, where
this is felt to be of importance in the analysis. This may be done
either as an informal prose description, or more formally using the
special purpose relation element, as described below:
describes any kind of relationship or linkage amongst a
specified
group of participants.
Attributes include:
categorizes the relationship in some respect, e.g. as
social, personal or other.
Suggested values include:
relationship concerned with social rolesrelationship concerned with personal roles, e.g. kinship,
marriage, etc.other kinds of relationshipbriefly describes the relationship.identifies the activeparticipants in a non-mutual
relationship, or all the participants in a mutual one.identifies the passive participants in a non-mutual
relationship.indicates whether the relationship holds equally amongst
all the participants.
Legal values are:
the relationship is mutualthe relationship is directed
A relationship, as defined here, may be any kind of
describable link between specified participants, for example a social
relationship (such as employer/employee), a personal relationship
(such as sibling, spouse, etc.) or something less precise such as
possessing shared knowledge. A relationship may be
mutual, in that all the participants engage in it on an
equal footing (for example the sibling relationship); or it may
not be if participants are not identical with respect to their role in
the relationship (for example, the employer relationship). For
non-mutual relationships, only two kinds of role are currently
supported; they are named active and
passive. These names are chosen to reflect the fact that
non-mutual relations are directed, in the sense that they
are most readily described by a transitive verb, or a verb phrase of
the form is X of or is X
to. The subject of the verb is classed as
active; the direct object of the verb, or the object of the
concluding preposition, as passive. Thus parents are
active and children passive in the relationship
parent (interpreted as is parent of); the
employer is active, the employee passive, in the
relationship employs. These relationships can be
inverted: parents are passive and children active in the
relationship is child of; similarly works
for inverts the active and passive roles of employs.
For example:
]]>
This example defines the following three relationships among
participants P1 through P7:
P1 and P2 are parents of P3 and P4.
P1 and P2 are linked in a mutual relationship called spouse
--- i.e. P2 is the spouse of P1, and P1 is the spouse of P2.
P1 has the social relationship employer with respect to P3,
P5, P6, and P7.
The elements discussed in this section are formally defined as
follows:
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The Setting Description
The settingDesc element is used to describe the setting or
settings in which language interaction takes place. It may contain a
prose description, analogous to a stage description at the start of a
play, stating in broad terms the locale, or a more detailed description
of a series of such settings. Individual settings may be associated
with particular participants by means of the optional who
attribute if, for example, participants are in different places. This
attribute identifies one or more individual participants or participant
groups, as discussed earlier in section . If this
attribute is not specified, the setting details provided are assumed to
apply to all participants represented in the language interaction.
The present proposals do not support the encoding of
different settings for the same participant. This is a subject for
further work.
Each distinct setting is described by means of a setting
element, which contains either a prose description or a combination of
the other elements listed below:
describes one particular setting in which a language
interaction
takes place.
Attributes include:
supplies the identifiers of the participants at this
setting.contains a proper noun or noun phrase.
Attributes include:
indicates the type of the object which is being named by
the phrase.contains a date in any format.
Attributes include:
gives the value of the date in some standard form, usually
yyyy-mm-dd.contains a phrase defining a time of day in any format.
Attributes include:
gives the value of the time in a standard form.contains a brief informal description of the nature of a
place for example a room, a restaurant, a park bench etc.contains a brief informal description of what a participant
in a
language interaction is doing other than speaking, if
anything.
The following example demonstrates the kind of background information
often required to support transcriptions of language interactions, first
encoded as a simple prose narrative:
The time is early spring, 1989. P1 and P2 are
playing on the rug of a suburban home in Bedford.
P3 is doing the washing up at the sink. P4 (a
radio announcer) is in a broadcasting studio in London.
]]>
The same information might be represented more formally in the following
way:
Bedford>
UK: South East>
early spring, 1989>
rug of a suburban home>
playing>
Bedford>
UK: South East>
early spring, 1989>
at the sink>
washing-up>
London, UK>
]]>
For more detailed encoding of names of persons and places, the
additional tag set described in chapter may
additionally be used; the above examples assume that only the general
purpose name element supplied in the core tag set is available.
The elements discussed in this section have the following formal
definitions:
]]>
Associating Contextual Information with a Text
This section discusses the assocation of the contextual information
held in the header with the individual elements making up a TEI text or
corpus. Contextual information is held in elements of various kinds
within the TEI header, as discussed elsewhere in this section and in
chapter . Here we consider what happens when different
parts of a document need to be associated with different contextual
information of the same type, for example when one part of a document
uses a different encoding practice from another, or where one part
relates to a different setting from another. In such situations, there
will be more than one instance of a header element of the relevant type.
The TEI DTDs allow for the following possibilities:
A given element may appear in the corpus header only, in the
header of one or more texts only, or in both places
There may be multiple occurrences of certain elements in either
corpus or text header.
To simplify the exposition, we deal with these two possibilities
separately in what follows; however, they may be combined as
desired.
Combining Corpus and Text Headers
A TEI conformant document may have more than one header only in the
case of a TEI corpus, which must have a header in its own right, as well
as the obligatory header for each text. Every element specified in a
corpus-header is understood as if it appeared within every text header
in the corpus. An element specified in a text header but not in the
corpus header supplements the specification for that text alone. If any
element is specified in both corpus and text headers, the corpus header
element is over-ridden for that text alone.
The titleStmt for a corpus text is understood to be
prefixed by the titleStmt given in the corpus header. All
other optional elements of the fileDesc should be omitted from
an individual corpus text header unless they differ from those
specified in the corpus header. All other header elements behave
identically, in the manner documented below.
This facility makes it possible to state once for all in the corpus
header each piece of contextual information which is common to the whole
of the corpus, while still allowing for individual texts to vary from
this common denominator.
For example, the following schematic shows the structure of a corpus
comprising three texts, the first and last of which share the same
encoding declaration. The second one has its own encoding declaration
... >
...
... >
... >
... >
...
... >
... >
...
... >
...
]]>
Declarable Elements
Certain of the elements which can appear within a TEI Header are
known as declarable elements. These elements have in
common the fact that they may be linked explicitly with a particular
part of a text or corpus by means of a decls attribute. This
linkage is used to over-ride the default association between
declarations in the header and a corpus or corpus text. The only header
elements which may be associated in this way are those which would not
otherwise be meaningfully repeatable.
An alphabetically ordered list of declarable elements follows:
contains a loosely-structured bibliographic citation of
which
the sub-components may or may not be explicitly
tagged. contains a fully-structured bibliographic citation, in
which all
components of the TEI file description
are
present.
contains a structured bibliographic citation, in which only
bibliographic subelements appear and in a specified order. describes a broadcast used as the source of a spoken text.states how and under what circumstances corrections have
been
made in the text.provides details of editorial principles and practices
applied
during the encoding of a text.provides technical details of the equipment and media used
for
an audio or video recording used as the source for a
spoken text.summarizes the way in which hyphenation in a source text
has been
treated in an encoded version of it.describes the scope of any analytic or interpretive
information
added to the text in addition to the
transcription. describes the languages, sublanguages, registers, dialects
etc.
represented within a text.contains a list of bibliographic citations of any kind. indicates the extent of normalization or regularization of
the
original source carried out in converting it to
electronic form.describes the identifiable speakers, voices or other
participants
in a linguistic interaction. describes in detail the aim or purpose for which an
electronic
file was encoded, together with any other
relevant information
concerning the process by which it
was assembled or collected.specifies editorial practice adopted with respect to
quotation
marks in the original. details of an audio or video recording event
used as the
source of a spoken text, either directly or from
a public
broadcast. contains a prose description of the rationale and methods
used
in sampling texts in the creation of a corpus or
collection.contains a citation giving details of the script used for
a spoken text.describes the principles according to which the text has
been
segmented, for example into sentences, tone-units,
graphemic strata,
etc.supplies a bibliographic description of the copy text(s)
from
which an electronic text was derived or generated.specifies the format used when standardized date or number
values are supplied.groups information which describes the nature or topic of a
text
in terms of a standard classification scheme,
thesaurus, etc.provides a description of a text in terms of its
situational parameters.
All of the above elements may be multiply defined within a single
header, that is, there may be more than one instance of any declarable
element type at a given level. When this occurs, the following rules
apply:
every declarable element must bear a unique identifier
for each different type of declarable element which occurs more
than once within the same parent element, exactly one element must be
specified as the default
In the following example, an editorial declaration contains two
possible correction policies, one identified as C1 and the
other as C2. Since there are two, one of them (in this case C1) must be
specified as the default:
... ...
...
...
]]>
For texts associated with the header in which this declaration appears
correction method C1 will be assumed, unless they explicitly state
otherwise. Here is the structure for a text which does state otherwise:
...
... ... ...
...
]]>
In this case, the contents of the divisions D1 and D3 will both use
correction policy C1, and those of division D2 will use correction
policy C2.
The decls attribute is defined for any element which is a
member of the class declaring. This includes the major
structural elements text, group, and div, as
well as smaller structural units, down to the level of paragraphs in
prose, individual utterances in spoken texts, and entries in
dictionaries. However, TEI recommended practice is to limit the number
of multiple declarable elements used by a document as far as possible,
for simplicity and ease of processing.
The identifier or identifiers specified by the decls
attribute are subject to two further restrictions:
An identifier specifying an element which contains multiple
instances of one or more other elements should be interpreted as if it
explicitly identified the elements identified as the default in each
such set of repeated elements
Each element specified, explicitly or implicitly, by the list of
identifiers must be of a different type.
To demonstrate how these rules operate, we now expand our earlier
example slightly:
...
...
...
...
]]>
This encoding description now has two editorial declarations,
identified as ED1 (the default) and ED2. For texts not specifying
otherwise, ED1 will apply. If ED1 applies, correction method C1a and
normalization method N1 apply, since these are the specified defaults
within ED1. In the same way, for a text specifying decls as
ED2, correction C2a, sampling SAMP2 and normalization N2b will
apply.
A finer grained approach is also possible. A text might specify
text decls='C2b N2a', or even text decls='C1a N2a
SAMP2', to mix and match declarations as
required. A tag such as text decls='ED1 ED2' would
(obviously) be illegal, since it includes two elements of the same type;
a tag such as text decls='ED2 C1a' is also illegal, since in
this context ED2 is synonymous with the defaults for that
editorial declaration, namely SAMP2 C2a N2b, resulting in a list
that identifies two correction elements (C1a and C2a).
Summary
The rules determing which of the declarable elements are applicable
at any point may be summarized as follows:
If there is a single occurrence of a given declarable
element in a corpus header, then it applies by default to all elements
within the corpus.
If there is a single occurrence of a given declarable
element in the text header, then it applies by default to all elements
of that text irrespective of the contents of the corpus header.
Where there are multiple occurrences of declarable elements
within either corpus or text header,
each must have a unique value specified as the value
of its id attribute;
one only must bear a default attribute with
the value YES.
It is a semantic error for an element to be associated
with more than one occurrence of any declarable element.
Selecting an element which contains multiple occurrences of a
given declarable element is semantically equivalent to selecting only
those contained elements which are specified as defaults.
An association made by one element applies by default
to all of its descendants.
Linguistic Annotation of Corpora
Language corpora often include analytic encodings or annotations,
designed to support a variety of different views of language. The
present Guidelines do not advocate any particular approach to linguistic
annotation (or tagging); instead a number of
general analytic facilities are provided which support the
representation of most forms of annotation in a standard and
self-documenting manner. Analytic annotation is of importance in many
fields, not only in corpus linguistics, and is therefore discussed in
general terms elsewhere in the Guidelines.
See in particular chapters ,
, and .
The present section presents informally some particular applications of
these general mechanisms to the specific practice of corpus linguistics.
Levels of Analysis
By linguistic annotation we mean here any annotation
determined by an analysis of linguistic features of the text, excluding
as borderline cases both the formal structural properties of the text
(e.g. its division into chapters or paragraphs) and descriptive
information about its context (the circumstances of its production, its
genre or medium). The structural properties of any TEI-conformant text
should be represented using the structural elements discussed elsewhere
in this chapter and in chapters , , and
the various chapters of Part III (on base tag sets). The contextual
properties of a TEI text are fully documented in the TEI Header, which
is discussed in chapter , and in section of the present chapter.
Other forms of linguistic annotation may be applied at a number of
levels in a text. A code (such as a word-class or part-of-speech
code) may be associated with each word or token, or with groups of such
tokens, which may be continuous, discontinuous or nested. A code may
also be associated with relationships (such as cohesion) perceived as
existing between distinct parts of a text. The codes themselves may
stand for discrete non-decomposable categories, or they may represent
highly articulated bundles of textual features. Their function may be
to place the annotated part of the text somewhere within a narrowly
linguistic or discoursal domain of analysis, or within a more general
semantic field, or any combination drawn from these and other domains.
The manner by which such annotations are generated and attached to
the text may be entirely automatic, entirely manual or a mixture. The
ease and accuracy with which analysis may be automated may vary with the
level at which the annotation is attached. The method employed should
be documented in the interpretation element within the encoding
description of the TEI Header, as described in section . Where different parts of a corpus have used different
annotation methods, the decls attribute may be used to
indicate the fact, as further discussed in section .
An extended example of one form of linguistic analysis commonly
practised in corpus linguistics is given in section .
Recommendations for the Encoding of Large Corpora
These Guidelines include proposals for the identification and
encoding of a far greater variety of textual features and
characteristics than is likely to be either feasible or desirable in
any one language corpus, however large and ambitious. The reasoning
behind this catholic approach is further discussed in chapter . For most large scale corpus projects, it will therefore
be necessary to determine a subset of TEI recommended elements
appropriate to the anticipated needs of the project. Mechanisms for
tailoring the TEI dtd to implement such a subset are described in
chapter and chapter ; they include
the ability to exclude selected element types, add new element types,
and change the names of existing elements. A discussion of the
implications of such changes for TEI conformance is provided in
chapter .
Because of the high cost of identifying and encoding many textual
features, and the difficulty in ensuring consistent practice across very
large corpora, encoders may find it convenient to divide the set of
elements to be encoded into the following three categories: