Adverbs and adverbials as indicators of objectivity in German audio description scripts

Résumé En

This presentation explores the question of the extent to which the automatic recognition of German adverbs and adverbials makes it possible to identify evidence for objectivity in audio description scripts. The corpus of this study consists of 24 episodes of the TV show Neues aus Büttenwarder recounting modern-day stories of a small village in Northern Germany. The part-of-speech tagger TreeTagger was used to search this corpus for adverbs and adverbials. The tags of the retrieved elements were checked and manually corrected if necessary. Then, the identified adverbs and adverbials were quantified and classified into semantic categories. These are the results obtained: The automatic recognition of adverbs and adverbials helps to document the degree of objective discourse in the different sections of the analysed audio description scripts. In particular the elements classified in the semantic category ‘modificative’ with its subcategories degree, evaluation, and judgment are strong indicators for the presence or absence of this feature in audio description scripts.