Abstract

This paper has two main goals. First, it discusses how the availability as well as the accessibility of spoken corpora of English, for example, or any other language (e.g., Spanish) have contributed to the sociolinguistic studies of discourse markers (DMs). Looking forward to being informed by the content from books and other materials adopting some useful methods in the literature, the paper, as an initial step, delineates the significance of building a sociolinguistic corpus of spoken Saudi Arabic. Second, the paper explores three basic steps and procedures for the construction of a spoken Saudi Arabic corpus: (1) the collection of spoken sources and structures of data (e.g., talk shows, radio, oral narratives, field work, and sociolinguistic interviews), (2) the development of transcription protocols, and (3) the incorporation of metadata for this kind of sociolinguistic spoken corpus. The paper discusses some of the expected methodological challenges associated with the three discussed steps and procedures of corpus building (e.g., data collection and adding and/or modifying sociolinguistic categories).

Keywords

Saudi Arabic; corpus linguistics; sociolinguistics; spoken discourse; discourse markers.

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