Learning Pragmatics through a Multimodal Corpus of Spanish Learners and Native Speakers

Abstract

When foreign language learners face a new language, besides learning a new grammar and vocabulary, they should learn to see the world through new pragmatic rules, in order to avoid pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic mistakes. The corpus website presented here is an advanced resource built to teach pragmatics in a SL/FL class at different levels. It analyzes and compares three different speech acts that are controversial and difficult for foreign language learners (compliments, refusals, and apologies). Moreover, given its multimodal nature, non-verbal language differences, gestures, as well as voice tone and proxemics are analyzed. The corpus allows to download the transcriptions in three different modes (with or without annotations and tags) for their study.