Developing the Social Cognition Parallax Interview Corpus (Scopic) for Balinese: Issues, challenges and prospects

This paper reports the development of the Social Cognition Parallax Interview Corpus (SCOPIC) for Balinese, outlining its issues, challenges and prospects. SCOPIC is a collaborative research project, aiming at the development of naturalistic but cross-linguistically-matched corpus data with enriched annotations of grammatical categories relevant to social cognition (Barth and Evans, 2017: 1). The data were collected using an innovative stimulus-elicitation methodology in a language documentation context that results in exposition, cooperative conversation and narrative data in different task phases (San Roque et al. 2012). This study used sixteen cards with family problem pictures that speakers must describe and organize into a narrative, which also involves description, and problem-solving. The recorded data were transcribed and processed using ELAN, enriched with tag annotations for social cognition research. The current research topics in SCOPIC include social ramifications of depicted events, reported speech and thought, possessed kin terms, and collective group terms. The development of Balinese corpus is still in its initial stage at the moment. We have identified and coded human referents in a small fraction of Badung, Singaraja, Gianyar and Nusa Penida corpus. We plan to investigate socialcognition issues in the range of research topics as done by other members in the SCOPIC consortium. We will discuss how Balinese can provide an interesting and unique angle and promising prospects in terms of social-cognition issues because of the complex caste-based social registers/speech level systems we have in Balinese. We will also report the technical issues in data collection and processing as well as larger linguistic issues such as dialect/register coverage and future directions of the development of multipurpose Balinese corpus.