How to prepare the video component of the Diachronic Corpus of Political Speeches for multimodal analysis

Abstract

The Diachronic Corpus of Political Speeches (DCPS) is a collection of 1,500 full-length political speeches in English. It includes speeches delivered in countries where English is an official language (the US, Britain, Canada, Ireland) by English-speaking politicians in various settings from 1800 up to the present time. Enriched with semi-automatic morphosyntactic annotations and with discourse-pragmatic manual annotations, the DCPS is designed to achieve maximum representativeness and balance for political English speeches from major national English varieties in time, preserve detailed metadata, and enable corpus-based studies of syntactic, semantic and discourse-pragmatic variation and change on political corpora. For speeches given from 1950 onwards, video-recordings of the original delivery are often retrievable online. This opens up avenues of research in multimodal linguistics, in which studies on the integration of speech and gesture in the construction of meaning can include analyses of recurrent gestures and of multimodal constructions. This article discusses the issues at stake in preparing the video-recorded component of the DCPS for linguistic multimodal analysis, namely the exploitability of recordings, the segmentation and alignment of transcriptions, the annotation of gesture forms and functions in the software ELAN and the quantity of available gesture data.