What Corpus Linguistics can offer Contact Linguistics: the C-ORAL-BRASIL corpus experience

Contact Linguistics, throughout its history, has been mostly a data-oriented subdiscipline. From the gathering of word lists in colonial settings by pioneer scholars to the current compilation of narratives, interviews and databanks, Contact Linguistics, differently from other Linguistics subdisciplines, has strived to base its findings on the analysis of actual language produced by speakers of a given language, and not on solely introspective methodologies. On the other hand, Corpus Linguistics has brought innovative methodological approaches to mostly every subfield in linguistic research. Corpora compilation parameters have taken representativeness and balance seriously and this, in turn, has aided the finding of generalizations about linguistic systems. In this paper, the C-ORAL-BRASIL corpus, a spontaneous speech corpus of informal Brazilian Portuguese is presented, and some of its characteristics that may be explored very profitably by a Contact Linguistics perspective are highlighted.

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