Corpus‐based analysis of spoken narratives. Introducing a corpus and a search tool

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the development of a synchronic corpus containing Serbian spoken narratives and its use for narrative analysis. The corpus (CRONUS – Corpus for the Research On Narratives and their Use in Speech) is optimised to study the structure and use of this discourse genre. First, data sources are presented, followed by corpus creation and access. The semi-spontaneous spoken narratives were orthographically transcribed, and the corpus deeply annotated, with special emphasis on the annotation of narrative sections following Labov’s approach and the annotation of argument structure constructions in the sense of Construction Grammar. Three case studies demonstrate how morphological and constructional annotation can be effective for the exploration of narratives.