Corpus Research of TORFL-1 Level Students’ Retelling Essays

Retelling, both oral and written, has been widely used by linguists as a basis for linguistic research. Retelling can be instrumental in studying various language aspects, as well as language production and acquisition. With the development of corpus linguistics, it became possible to study retellings with the help of corpus instruments. Different markup schemes have been suggested to enable annotating transcripts of oral retelling in corpora. However, to the best of my knowledge, only a few specialized annotation schemes for written retellings have been suggested so far. Written retellings require customized annotation schemes since stimulus is never taken into account when annotating retellings in a corpus, what limits the possibility of using a corpus as a research tool. This paper is aimed at developing a markup scheme for a subcorpus of the Russian Learner Corpus (RLC). The subcorpus will consist of retellings written by the students of Russian as a Foreign language during The First Certification Level test. An annotation scheme developed in the current paper provides a variety of tags which are used for annotating various features of a retelling. Among those are fragments copied from the source texts, implicatures, numerous types of text transformation and semantic errors.