Project Issue #4

[brucknerp]

The past week I (Paige) finished transcribing all the song .txt files, and we both have started drilling through markup, Gina on structure and me on features. I also updated our schema that the angel Gina has developed to account for linguistic feature tagging. Instead of creating a specified list of features and dumping them all in the schema itself, I decided to have attributes for the type of feature (1st/2nd/3rd pronoun, sentence-final particle, honorific, and other (for now)), and then just tag the features as they appear, documenting them as I go along.

One issue I'm (Paige) having on my end is designating feature genders. Because I am not a native speaker and also because the whole concept of what feature is male/female is a social construct and shifts over time (what we are searching for) there are several features that some sources say are masculine and other feminine, so I am debating how to label several of these features. Also, I am not sure whether to specify the politeness level of referential (kind of like tu versus vous in French) because the required level of politeness is unbalanced for men and women--i.e. women are already held at a higher standard to use polite speech, so in normal conversation men will use their designated plain pronoun "boku", whereas women use "watashi", which is technically the polite form, and men would use this too in a more polite context.

In other news, we are also working on conceptualizing and designing our website.

[enb34]

It's very interesting (and probably frustrating) that you have conflicting sources on gender features. I'm guessing that this is why you have a "mixed" option for the gender attribute in your schema. It might be worthwhile to note what time your sources were published, and to see if this corresponds with other gender features in the songs from similar time periods.

Personally, I would think that specifying the politeness of referential would be worthwhile, especially because women often speak more politely than men. At the very least, you track whether or not this has stayed the same over time, or whether men or women have had some changes in the politeness of their speech.

[Idi0teque]

Good stuff! Did you guys ever figure out how to handle the copyright issue? Also, I noticed that in certain songs women will use "boku" to refer to themselves (and "anata" to refer to others, something that's technically "impolite"); will whatever kind of markup you use take into consideration varying politeness levels in songs? I'd definitely mark up politeness, however!