DiVE-Arabic:Gulf Arabic Dialogue in a Virtual Environment

Documentation of communicative behaviour across languages seems at a crossroads. While methods for collecting data on spoken or written communication, backed up by computational techniques, are evolving, the actual data being collected remain largely the same. Inspired by the efforts of some innovative researchers who are directly tackling the various obstacles to investigating language in the field (e.g. see various papers collected in Enfield & Stivers 2007), we report here about ongoing work to solve the general problem of collecting in situ data for situated linguistic interaction. The initial stages of this project have involved employing a portable format designed to increase range and flexibility of doing such collections in the field. Our motivation is to combine this with a parallel data set for a typologically distinct language, in order to contribute a parallel corpus of situated language use.