La paciencia y el tiempo hacen más que la fuerza y la violencia.” Jean de la Fontaine

“La paciencia tiene más poder que la fuerza.” Plutarco

“Paciencia: forma menor de desesperación disfrazada de virtud.” Ambrose Bierce

“A volte la paura è proprio una brutta cosa. Non ti fa vivere i momenti più belli. È una specie di maledizione se non sai vincerla.”

(Libro: Tre metri sopra il cielo -Federico Moccia)

http://arthistory.heindorffhus.dk/frame-Vermeer.htm

http://www.artonstamps.org/Art-Gallery/Vermeer/vermeer.htm

· What are the characteristics of contemporary academic speech—its grammar, its vocabulary, its functions and purposes, its fluencies and dysfluencies?

· Are these characteristics different for different academic disciplines and for different classes of speakers?

The goal of the first phase of the project was to record and transcribe close to 200 hours (approximately 1.8 million words) of academic speech from across the university. Nowadays, there are 152 transcripts (totaling 1,848,364 words) available at this site. The digital sound recordings were transcribed with the help of a computer program called SoundScriber.

The entire corpus is available at micase.umdl.umich.edu, as it was planned as an easily available “open” project. This search engine is notable for the large number of speaker and speech-event categories that can be selected. The ELI committed resources to MICASE for a series of reasons:

-There was originally no database of this kind available.

-MICASE provides authentic material in sufficient quantity to redefine our concepts of academic speech, because we can find many divergences from those described in current grammar and vocabulary books.

-There is the hope that people would be able to track changes in speech patterns as they gain experience of university culture.

-With all this new information, people will be in a better position to develop more appropriate ESL and English for Academic Purpose teaching and testing materials, and to evaluate how best to incorporate them.

How to use it:

We can choose the option:

-Browse MICCASE: This option must be chosen to browse the corpus according to specified speaker and speech attributes, returning quick file references.

We have to choose the criteria using the menus and then click the button to see transcripts that fit the criteria. We can choose between some speaker’s attributes, such as: academic position/role, native speaker status and the first language. And we also have some transcript attributes, such as: speech event types, Academic Division, Academic Discipline, Participant Level and Interactivity Rating.

-Search MICASE: This option must be chosen to search the corpus for words or phrases in specified contexts, returning concordance results with references to files, full utterances, and speakers.

We have to enter the exact word or phrase we wish to find in the box. The wildcard character * may be used at the end (but not the beginning) of a search word or phrase to represent zero or more characters (e.g. typing in walk* will give you walk, walks, walked, and walking). If we wish to search the entire corpus, we have to use the default settings on the speaker and transcript attributes. If we wish to do a more specific search, we have to choose the speaker and transcript level criteria using the menus on the right. When we click the button, utterances by speakers that fit the speaker-level criteria within transcripts that fit the transcript-level criteria will be found. We can choose between some speaker’s attributes: that added to the ones found in “Browse Micase” we also find age and gender; and transcript attributes, with the same options to choose as in Browse MICASE”.

Information taken from the main page of the “Michigan corpus of Academic Spoken English“.

Some of the advantages of it, is that we can see how words and phrases have increased and decreased in usage, and how they have changed their meaning over time, by looking at changes in collocates (co-occurring words). We can also have the corpus generate a list of words that were used more in one period than another, even when you don’t know what the specified words might be.

To look up a word, we can choose the type of display:

• CHART: This option presents “bar charts” that indicate the overall frequency for all matching words or phrases in each section of the corpus. This is probably the best option for comparing between different genres, or to compare time blocks.
• LIST: With this option, we see a listing of each individual word or string that matches the query. 
• COMPARE WORDS: This allows us to compare the collocates (nearby words) for two different words. When selected, we will see the frequency of each matching string for the following nine groupings: [genres] spoken, fiction, magazines, newspapers, academic; [time blocks] 1990-1994, 1995-1999, 2000-2004, 2005-2007. When it is not selected, you will see the overall frequency in the entire corpus. 

In the search string:

• You enter the basic search string (words). We can also enter “context” words and indicate how many words away this is with. We can use parts of speech as part of our query. For example, [j*] eyes in [1] would find a two word string, composed of a form of eyes immediately preceded by an adjective.
• We can also create “User lists” or “customized lists”, relating to a certain topic, words that are grammatically related, or any other listing.

In the section:

• We can chose the date, or dates to compare and the minimun frequency.

Now that we have seen all the option of search and we have given a little introduction of how to use them, we can try and see all the possibilities this program offers us, wich is very useful for doing any research or statistics.

It is a group of parallel textal corpus of registers, specialized in contemporary Galician language. It has been made by SLI (Seminario de Lingüística Informática) in 2003. It has an extension of 22 million words, and its main components are the TECTRA corpus of English- Galician literary texts, the FEGA corpus of French- Galician literary texts, the LEGA corpus of Galician- Spanish legal and administrative texts, the English- Galician- French- Spanish UNESCO corpus of scientific spreading, the LOGALIZA corpus of English- Galician software location and the Spanish- Galician- Catalan- Basque CONSUMER corpus of information about the consumption.

The public consultation of the texts is made through a spanish interface available in http://sli.uvigo.es/CLUVI/. It allow making simple or complex researches of words or expressions, and see the plurilingual equivalences of the searched words in the contexts of use in real or documented translations.

The number of works available in the page and the number of languages in which they are available grow regularly, as the investigation project of CLUVI is still working.

Moreover, the Corpus Paralelo CLUVI allow look for another corpora apart from TECTRA, FEGA, LEGA, LOGALIZA and UNESCO. I also has to be said that through the CLUVI interface we can access to the TURIGAL corpus of turism portuguese-english, the LEGEBIDUN corpus Basque- Spanish of legal and administrative texts developped by the group DELi of Deusto University.

Bibliography: CLUVI