Papers by Andy Wood-hung Seto
It is repeatedly mentioned in the Hong Kong Certificate of Education (HKCE) English Language exam... more It is repeatedly mentioned in the Hong Kong Certificate of Education (HKCE) English Language examination reports that one prevalent problem in speaking assessment is the inappropriate use of stock phrases for expressing agreement. Phrases such as 'I agree.' and 'That's a good idea.' were overly used without reference to the context. In Hong Kong, English language textbooks are the primary, if not the only, sources for the local candidates to prepare for the speaking assessment. When textbook English does not accurately reflect the authentic use of expressions for agreement, candidates will probably not be able to use them appropriately in group discussion. This book is a corpus-based study focusing on a comparison between textbook English and corpus English. It aims to find out how corpus data help improve teaching and learning of agreement for local students. It is argued that corpus evidence would be useful for textbook writers to describe and explain the appro...
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Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research, 2021
The present study employed an analytical framework that is characterised by a synthesis of quanti... more The present study employed an analytical framework that is characterised by a synthesis of quantitative and qualitative analyses with a specially designed computer software SpeechActConc to examine speech acts in business communication. The naturally occurring data from the audio recordings and the prosodic transcriptions of the business sub-corpora of the HKCSE (prosodic) are manually annotated with a speech act taxonomy for finding out the frequency of fillers, the co-occurring patterns of fillers with other speech acts, and the linguistic realisations of fillers. The discoursal function of fillers to sustain the discourse or to hold the floor has diverse linguistic realisations, ranging from a sound (e.g. 'uhuh') and a word (e.g. 'well') to sounds (e.g. 'um er') and words, namely phrase ('sort of') and clause (e.g. 'you know'). Some are even combinations of sound(s) and word(s) (e.g. 'and um', 'yes er um', 'sort of erm'). Among the top five frequent linguistic realisations of fillers, 'er' and 'um' are the most common ones found in all the six genres with relatively higher percentages of occurrence. The remaining more frequent realisations consist of clause ('you know'), word ('yeah') and sound ('erm'). These common forms are syntactically simpler than the less frequent realisations found in the genres. The co-occurring patterns of fillers and other speech acts are diverse. The more common co-occurring speech acts with fillers include informing and answering. The findings show that fillers are not only frequently used by speakers in spontaneous conversation but also mostly represented in sounds or non-linguistic realisations.
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The Asian ESP Journal, 2013
With the advancement of information and communication technology, the study of speech acts is
not... more With the advancement of information and communication technology, the study of speech acts is
not only restricted to language philosophers but includes researchers who are interested in the
study of speech acts in conversational corpora (Archer, Culpeper, & Davies, 2008; Cheng, 2009;
Cheng & Tsui, 2009; Cheng & Warren, 2005, 2006; Jucker, 2009; Seto, 2009, 2010). Other
researchers have attempted to develop software that can automatically identify speech acts from
corpus data, resulting in annotated corpora in specific domains for different tasks (Allen and
Core 1997; Bunt, 2009, 2011; Carletta et al., 1997; Dhillon et al, 2004; Geertzen, Petukhova, &
Bunt, 2007; Stiles, 1992; Stolcke et al., 2000; Weisser, 2003). In this paper I present an attempt
to annotate speech acts in business meetings in the business sub-corpus of the Hong Kong
Corpus of Spoken English (Prosodic) (HKCSE (Prosodic)) with the aid of a computer-mediated
program SpeechActConc designed by Chris Greaves for the analysis of the annotated corpus
data. SpeechActConc is capable of automatically identifying annotated speech acts in a corpus,
displaying information about each speech act and concordancing speech acts, listed by frequency
and sorted by co-occurring or co-selected speech acts to the right and left of the centred speech
acts. It can also automatically find 2, 3, or 4 speech act co-occurrences (Cheng, Greaves, &
120
Warren, 2005, 2006; Cheng, Greaves, Sinclair, & Warren, 2009). I will analyze the speech acts
in the annotated corpus to explore the use and patterns of speech acts in business meetings in
Hong Kong to find out the relative frequencies of occurrence of different speech acts in business
meetings, to explore the predictable sequencing patterns of speech acts, to identify the
characteristic lexical-grammatical patterns or linguistic realizations of different speech acts, and
to put forward some possible implications for ESP teaching.
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Conference Presentations by Andy Wood-hung Seto
The present study aims to investigate, by means of analysis of a corpus of manually annotated spe... more The present study aims to investigate, by means of analysis of a corpus of manually annotated speech acts, the features of all the speech acts in six different communicative contexts from a corpus of spoken business discourse. The findings indicate that the process of manual annotation of speech acts is laborious and requires a number of revisions regarding annotation criteria and outcomes. Despite the different contexts of interaction in the corpus, the quantitative data generated by SpeechActConc show that there are similarities in the number and the category of unique speech acts as well as in the frequency and the co-occurrence of different speech acts among the six genres (meeting, telephone call, informal office talk, service encounter: airport and hotel, Q&A session, interview: job and placement). In analysing the predictable patterns of speech acts, the most frequent co-occurring speech acts are discussed. In examining the lexicogrammatical patterns of speech acts, traditional markers such as inform or opine markers are not the only linguistic realisations; phrases/clauses are common to perform different speech acts. (Proceedings of the 4th Asia Pacific Corpus Linguistics Conference (APCLC 2018))
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Books by Andy Wood-hung Seto
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015
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Papers by Andy Wood-hung Seto
not only restricted to language philosophers but includes researchers who are interested in the
study of speech acts in conversational corpora (Archer, Culpeper, & Davies, 2008; Cheng, 2009;
Cheng & Tsui, 2009; Cheng & Warren, 2005, 2006; Jucker, 2009; Seto, 2009, 2010). Other
researchers have attempted to develop software that can automatically identify speech acts from
corpus data, resulting in annotated corpora in specific domains for different tasks (Allen and
Core 1997; Bunt, 2009, 2011; Carletta et al., 1997; Dhillon et al, 2004; Geertzen, Petukhova, &
Bunt, 2007; Stiles, 1992; Stolcke et al., 2000; Weisser, 2003). In this paper I present an attempt
to annotate speech acts in business meetings in the business sub-corpus of the Hong Kong
Corpus of Spoken English (Prosodic) (HKCSE (Prosodic)) with the aid of a computer-mediated
program SpeechActConc designed by Chris Greaves for the analysis of the annotated corpus
data. SpeechActConc is capable of automatically identifying annotated speech acts in a corpus,
displaying information about each speech act and concordancing speech acts, listed by frequency
and sorted by co-occurring or co-selected speech acts to the right and left of the centred speech
acts. It can also automatically find 2, 3, or 4 speech act co-occurrences (Cheng, Greaves, &
120
Warren, 2005, 2006; Cheng, Greaves, Sinclair, & Warren, 2009). I will analyze the speech acts
in the annotated corpus to explore the use and patterns of speech acts in business meetings in
Hong Kong to find out the relative frequencies of occurrence of different speech acts in business
meetings, to explore the predictable sequencing patterns of speech acts, to identify the
characteristic lexical-grammatical patterns or linguistic realizations of different speech acts, and
to put forward some possible implications for ESP teaching.
Conference Presentations by Andy Wood-hung Seto
Books by Andy Wood-hung Seto
not only restricted to language philosophers but includes researchers who are interested in the
study of speech acts in conversational corpora (Archer, Culpeper, & Davies, 2008; Cheng, 2009;
Cheng & Tsui, 2009; Cheng & Warren, 2005, 2006; Jucker, 2009; Seto, 2009, 2010). Other
researchers have attempted to develop software that can automatically identify speech acts from
corpus data, resulting in annotated corpora in specific domains for different tasks (Allen and
Core 1997; Bunt, 2009, 2011; Carletta et al., 1997; Dhillon et al, 2004; Geertzen, Petukhova, &
Bunt, 2007; Stiles, 1992; Stolcke et al., 2000; Weisser, 2003). In this paper I present an attempt
to annotate speech acts in business meetings in the business sub-corpus of the Hong Kong
Corpus of Spoken English (Prosodic) (HKCSE (Prosodic)) with the aid of a computer-mediated
program SpeechActConc designed by Chris Greaves for the analysis of the annotated corpus
data. SpeechActConc is capable of automatically identifying annotated speech acts in a corpus,
displaying information about each speech act and concordancing speech acts, listed by frequency
and sorted by co-occurring or co-selected speech acts to the right and left of the centred speech
acts. It can also automatically find 2, 3, or 4 speech act co-occurrences (Cheng, Greaves, &
120
Warren, 2005, 2006; Cheng, Greaves, Sinclair, & Warren, 2009). I will analyze the speech acts
in the annotated corpus to explore the use and patterns of speech acts in business meetings in
Hong Kong to find out the relative frequencies of occurrence of different speech acts in business
meetings, to explore the predictable sequencing patterns of speech acts, to identify the
characteristic lexical-grammatical patterns or linguistic realizations of different speech acts, and
to put forward some possible implications for ESP teaching.