An XML Annotation Scheme for Space in an Italian Corpus

The new resource we present consists of a corpus of oral spatial descriptions performed by congenital blind and sighted Italian subjects. The collection of the data is part of a wider project on semantic representations in the language of the blind, carried out at the Department of Linguistics, University of Pisa. The long term goal of the project is to use the evidence collected on congenital blind subjects to get at a better understanding of the relationship between linguistic and perceptive information. The corpus is currently being enhanced with different layers of annotation, focusing on spatial information. The annotation allows us to highlight the effect of the specific lexical and grammatical features of Italian on the encoding of space (e.g. with respect to the way spatial relations are encoded in motion verbs). Our resource is not only one of the few annotated corpora of spoken Italian, but it is also the first one that focuses on spatial categories.