The DART annotation scheme: form, appliability & application

Abstract

The Dialogue Annotation and Research Tool (DART) is a tool designed to facilitate large-scale corpus-based research into pragmatics-related aspects, including syntax, pragmatics (speech-acts), semantico-pragmatics (Searle’s ‘IFIDS’), as well as other interaction-relevant features. This chapter aims at providing a detailed description and discussion of the DART annotation scheme, which has already been successfully applied to a number of corpora from various domains, and provide examples of its application and appliability to various types of spoken data, illustrating e.g. the ability to create speaker profiles that allow the researcher to investigate features of (in)directness & politeness, initiative, etc. (cf. Weisser 2016d). In doing so, I shall draw on materials from task-oriented corpora (SPAADIA; SRI Amex), unconstrained dialogue (Switchboard), and ‘English as a lingua franca (ELF)’ data from ICE-HK, at the same time illustrating the advantages of the scheme over prior existing schemes.