The project

Tuesday May 10th, 2022

In recent years, new technologies have favoured the development of forms of written language with features that bring them closer to speech: this is the case, for example, of messages typed on social networks and chats, which are distinguished from more traditional written forms by a more informal use of language, with the presence of emoticons and emoji, a peculiar use of punctuation and capitalization, etc.. More recently the spread of voice messages on instant messaging systems, such as WhatsApp or Telegram has allowed a return to speech, which finds space, in turn with peculiar characteristics, in writing. This begs the question: how do we speak when we write? How do we write when we speak? In other words, what are the characteristics of this “new Italian”?

The WhAP! project, conceived in 2020 by a group of students from the Department of Humanities, was created to answer these questions. The main goal is to build an online resource (the WhAP corpus) that includes written data (text chats) and spoken data (voice messages), also taking into account several parameters (e.g. age range and gender of the writers). The resource will allow to observe these hybrid interactions, in which spoken and written interact giving rise to new forms of conversation.

The corpus, still under construction, counts at the moment 58 chats (for about 22 thousand words) and 211 voice messages. From these data, it has already been possible to draw some initial results; for example, the frequent presence of languages other than Italian, such as English or Spanish, as well as various Italian dialects, from Lombard to Sardinian:

(1) 19/04/20, 23:13 – EM01: Easy easy, allora a posto!
(2) 08/05/20, 11:57 – EM01: Ti ricordi come si chiama il ristorante mega bueno dove siamo andate a mangiare con Renata e Franca da te?

In order to answer the starting questions, it will be necessary, on the one hand, to increase the data available and, on the other hand, to make it accessible to potentially interested people. The final goal is therefore to make the corpus, adequately anonymized, public and freely consultable, available both to specialists (for linguistic research) and, more generally, to people interested in phenomena concerning language.

Objectives that the project intends to realistically achieve with the money raised through this crowdfunding campaign
– Training of students in the creation and management of the resource (WhAP corpus)
– Implementation of the resource (creation and development of the interface, online publication, subsequent management)
– Organisation of a conference to present the resource
– Publication of a short guide to the use of social networks

Link :
Website: https://corpuswhap.wordpress.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/corpuswhap-111396488214228/
Instagram: @corpus.whap

Email:
Project leader: ilaria.fiorentini@unipv.it

Goals

Video

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