Multi-CAST Vera'a

How to cite

If you use these data please cite

• the original source

  Schnell, Stefan. 2023. Multi-CAST Vera'a. In Haig, Geoffrey & Schnell, Stefan (eds.), Multi-CAST: Multilingual corpus of annotated spoken texts. Version 2311. Bamberg: University of Bamberg. (multicast.aspra.uni-bamberg.de/#veraa) (date accessed)

• the derived dataset using the DOI of the particular released version you were using

Description

Vera'a (vera1241) is an Oceanic (Austronesian) language from the village of the same name on Vanua Lava (13.80°S 167.47°E), one of the Banks Islands in North Vanuatu. The language has approximately 450 speakers and is the first language of most inhabitants of Vera'a and the coastline to the north of it. Vera'a is closely related to the neighbouring language Vurës, and speakers of Vera'a also speak Vurës.

Both languages have been extensively documented within a VolkswagenStiftung-funded DOBES documentation project (2006–2012; PI: Dr Catriona Hyslop-Malau). Vera'a has been the focus of Stefan Schnell's PhD project at Kiel University (2007–2010, see Schnell 2011), and Stefan has subsequently been undertaking additional documentary work on Vera'a as part of his ARC-funded DECRA project Typology of Language Use (ARC grant no. DE120102017) in 2012–2015, hosted by La Trobe University (Melbourne, Australia).

The Multi-CAST Vera'a corpus consists of 10 folkloristic narrative texts collected and annotated by Stefan Schnell. They constitute a subcorpus of a larger corpus of Vera'a compiled and curated by Stefan Schnell in close collaboration with speakers of the language and researchers of other disciplines from outside the community. Annotations with RefIND were added to the corpus in 2019 by Stefan Schnell and Maria Vollmer.

The texts in this corpus (version 2207) have been time-aligned at the phone level for a data set in the DoReCo project.

This dataset is licensed under a CC-BY-4.0 license

Available online at https://multicast.aspra.uni-bamberg.de/#veraa

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Loading

Corpus counts

Only a small number of basic GRAID symbols are counted:

Function symbols

• ⟨0⟩ zero
• ⟨pro⟩ definite pronoun
• ⟨np⟩ full noun phrase
• ⟨other⟩ form not further specified

Person/Animacy symbols

• ⟨.1⟩ first person
• ⟨.2⟩ second person
• ⟨.h⟩ third person, human
• ⟨.d⟩ third person, anthropomorphic
• ø third person, non-human

Function symbols

• ⟨:s⟩ subject of an intransitive clause
• ⟨:a⟩ subject of a transitive clause
• ⟨:ncs⟩ non-canonical subject
• ⟨:p⟩ direct object
• ⟨:obl⟩ oblique argument
• ⟨:g⟩ goal argument
• ⟨:l⟩ locational argument
• ⟨:pred⟩ predicate
• ⟨:poss⟩ possessive
• ⟨:other⟩ function not further specified

Only basic categories are listed; categories represented by complex symbols with additional specifiers (e.g. ⟨dem_pro⟩ ‘demonstrative pronoun’) have been subsumed under the more basic category (e.g. ⟨pro⟩ ‘definite pronoun’). Please refer to the annotation notes for this corpus for information on all annotated categories, including those not listed here.

GRAID	⟨:s⟩	⟨:a⟩	⟨:ncs⟩	⟨:p⟩	⟨:obl⟩	⟨:g⟩	⟨:l⟩	⟨:pred⟩	⟨:poss⟩	⟨:other⟩	totals
⟨0.1⟩	9	3	0	2	0	0	0	0	0	0	14
⟨0.2⟩	29	13	0	1	0	0	0	0	0	0	43
⟨0.h⟩	369	181	0	20	10	1	0	0	0	0	581
⟨0.d⟩	134	86	0	14	1	0	0	0	0	0	235
⟨0⟩	79	17	0	154	14	8	3	0	0	0	275
⟨pro.1⟩	231	97	0	38	11	6	0	3	69	1	456
⟨pro.2⟩	124	65	0	38	5	8	0	0	41	1	282
⟨pro.h⟩	693	345	0	116	11	54	0	0	278	0	1497
⟨pro.d⟩	132	43	0	16	0	13	0	0	23	0	227
⟨pro⟩	64	9	0	4	0	1	0	5	26	1	110
⟨np.1⟩	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
⟨np.2⟩	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
⟨np.h⟩	260	62	0	87	11	45	0	48	53	5	571
⟨np.d⟩	110	27	0	24	5	21	0	12	11	0	210
⟨np⟩	175	26	0	478	68	245	100	90	4	204	1390
⟨other.1⟩	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
⟨other.2⟩	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
⟨other.h⟩	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
⟨other.d⟩	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
⟨other⟩	5	0	0	0	12	59	111	283	0	0	470
	2414	974	0	992	148	461	214	441	505	212	6361

Clause boundaries

GRAID	count
⟨##⟩	3201
⟨#⟩	407
totals	3608

Corpus metadata

• Annotation notes
• Metadata
• Translated texts

CLDF Datasets

The following CLDF datasets are available in cldf:

• CLDF TextCorpus at cldf/TextCorpus-metadata.json