Balinese SCOPIC Project

I Wayan Arka (Team Leader)
Desak Eka Pratiwi (Member)
Gede Primahadi Wijaya Rajeg (Member)

Our Balinese SCOPIC project is part of the international collaborative SCOPIC
(Social Cognition Parallax Interview Corpus) project, aiming at the development of naturalistic but cross-linguistically-matched corpus data with enriched annotations of grammatical categories relevant to social cognition (Barth and Evans, 2017:1).

The data collection in our Balinese SCOPIC project follows the innovative stimulus-elicitation methodology in a language documentation context as outlined in Roque et al. (2012). It has resulted in exposition, cooperative conversation and narrative data in different task phases. We have collected number of data from different Balinese dialects, such as Badung, Gianyar, Singaraja and Klungkung (including Nusa Penida). The recorded data were transcribed and processed using ELAN, enriched with tag annotations for social cognition research.

In SCOPIC research, we are interested in variability within functional domains both inside a language and across languages. With adequate data, we are able to investigate variability within the speech of participants as well. Our Balinese SCOPIC research has made good progress, with current tagging and research topics already covering human referents, benefactives, reported speech and stance. The analysis of SCOPIC data has revealed how Balinese can provide an insightful and unique angle, and promising prospects in terms of social-cognition issues because of the complex caste-based social registers/speech level systems we have in Balinese. You can view our papers, including Pratiwi, Arka and Shiohara (2018).