Introduction to Corpus Phonetics (Prof. Tang, SS 2024, Wed: 14:30--16:00)

**Audience:** Students who would like to improve their employability by learning a highly desirable skill. Students who would like to do any English Linguistic courses with a quantitative component in the future, especially in the area of phonetics and phonology. It can also be beneficial to those who are more literature-based but would like to do more digital humanities. Students who are interested in Artificial Intelligence.

**Keywords: **
quantitative analysis, R, phonetics, phonology, language, linguistics

**Description:**
This course aims to fill a gap between the students’ knowledge in phonetics and phonology and their ability to applying that knowledge to ask non-trival research questions using a large amount of speech and lexical data. It would cover corpus compilation, semi-automatic annotation (phonetic transcription and forced-alignment), extraction of phonetic and phonological variables and the basics of statistical analyses of corpus data. It complements other courses such as advanced phonetics, quantitative and experimental methods, and corpus/computational linguistics. The course will involve the use of programming languages (such as Python, R and unix commands) and they will be introduced as needed.

**Textbook:**
While we won't be using a single textbook, we will likely sample from the following textbook: Harrington, J. (2010). Phonetic analysis of speech corpora. John Wiley & Sons.

** Requirements **

Requirements for 2 CPs are a set of assignments plus an active participation in all in-class activities. Requirements for 3 CPs are similar to those for 2 CPs but have more assignments. All will be described in the course syllabus that will be provided and discussed in the first session.
In case that you miss more than 2 sessions, you will have to compensate for this participation by handing in extra written work.