Multimodal Corpora with MCA

The study presented in this article is part of an ongoing research strand that investigates how multimodal corpora, and multimodal concordancing in particular, can be integrated into university syllabuses (Baldry et al., 2005; Coccetta, 2004; Grunther, 2005; Ackerley and Coccetta, in press; Dalziel and Metelli, in press; Baldry, forthcoming; this volume). The article is based on previous work in the use of corpora and concordancers in the language classroom to analyse lexicogrammatical patterns (Johns, 1991; Partington, 1998; Gavioli and Aston, 2001), but discusses their limitations in the investigation of multimodal texts, focusing mostly on spoken texts. In particular, it reports on research which is being carried out on the Padova Multimedia English Corpus (Padova MEC) and suggests how spoken corpora can be exploited to promote communicative language competence. In so doing, it introduces the concept of functional-notional concordancing and moves away from what Baldry (forthcoming; this volume) defines as monomodal form-oriented concordancing towards meaning-oriented concordancing. Finally, the article presents the online multimodal concordancer MCA (Multimodal Corpus Authoring System, Baldry, 2005), the tool used to investigate parts of the Padova MEC for functions and notions, and gives some practical examples of functional-notional concordancing.