Multimedia Presentation of Grammatical Description: Design Issues

Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Workshop 2005, pages 113–119, Sydney, Australia, December 2005. Multimedia presentation of grammatical description: design issues Simon MUSGRAVE School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics Monash University Victoria 3800 Australia Simon.Musgrave@arts.monash.edu.au Abstract In this paper, I argue that grammatical description of language is a type of information which is ideally suited to presentation as a multimedia object structured with hypertext. I examine three existing language resources, constructed for different audiences, and discuss various features of each which bear on the design issues relevant to grammatical description. From my examination of these exemplars, I argue for four guidelines in the design of a multimedia grammar: data centricity, multiple linking, exhaustive coding in data structures, and user control of the amount of information accessed. 1.Introduction Any reasonably complete description of a language is a complex object. Traditionally, such works are divided into various components: a grammar, a dictionary and a text collection. But of course these are really highly inter-related. For example, a single entry in the dictionary is of little value without the general information about words of that class which can be found in the grammar, and any point made in the grammar may be hard to grasp without extensive exemplification from texts.. An impression of the complexity involved can be gauged from the following comments by two reviewers of a description published as three separate volumes (Heath 1980, 1982, 1984): “Unfortunately, F[unctional] G[rammar of] N[unggubuyu] is a very demanding work, both because of the inherent complexity of the language and because it requires the reader to make constant reference to the text volume.” (Blake 1985: 310); “the work is particularly difficult to read. H[eath] makes no pedagogical concessions to the reader. One must look up the attestations for every major grammatical point in another volume.” (Haiman 1986: 654-655). The interrelatedness of the various components discussed above immediately suggests that hypertext would be a better means of presentation and additional benefits could come from making the grammatical description a multimedia object, rather than a text object. Examples could be heard in the original sound recorded by the researcher, or even seen as video clips where such presentation would aid the consumer (for example, where gesture added an important element of meaning to the utterance). In addition to the improved accessibility of the descriptive information, such presentation would bring the consumer much closer to the primary data, actual language in use, and therefore multimedia language description would increase substantially the standard of accountability in linguistics. However, the standard paper and ink presentation of grammatical description has an established linear format which is not suitable for the new medium. In this paper, I examine three existing presentations of language data as multimedia: an online documentation, documentation published as CD-ROM, and an a online language learning site. I suggest that each of these exemplars can provide important hints to the most appropriate structure for multimedia grammatical description. 1. The organization of grammatical description Most grammatical descriptions published in book …

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