Corpora and the study of spoken language (Pre-published version)

Abstract

Spoken corpora have evolved over the 40 last four decades from early attempts at corpus-building for the purposes of better understanding such phenomena as first-language acquisition, social variation and conversational structure, 45 to the large, general spoken corpora of today, which have found applications in a variety of contexts from speech recognition, lexicography, sociolinguistics and first and second 50 language acquisition. In this article we focus on spoken corpora and their applications in linguistics and applied linguistics, rather than on ‘speech corpora’, which are typically collected 55 for the purposes of improving technology, a distinction discussed at greater length by Wichmann in article 15; see also article 32.