The Lancaster Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation Spoken Corpus

Abstract

The four major objectives of the project were: i) to establish an electronic corpus of (a) conversations, from the British National Corpus (BNC) and (b) oral narratives, from Lancaster's Centre for North Western Regional Studies (CNWRS) oral history archive; ii) to annotate the corpus manually for categories of Speech, Thought and Writing Presentation (ST and WP); iii) to conduct systematic quantitative and qualitative analyses of the annotated corpus and iv) to compare the findings with those of Short and Semino's 1994-7 study of ST and WP in a corpus of written fictional and non-fictional British English narratives (BA LRG M-AN2314/APN/3489). A full description of the corpus can be found on the project website at: http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/stwp/default.htm McIntyre, D., C. Bellard-Thomson, J. Heywood, A. McEnery, E. Semino and M. Short. 2003. 'The construction of a corpus to investigate the presentation of speech, thought and writing in written and spoken British English.' In Archer, D., P. Rayson, A. Wilson and A. McEnery (eds). Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics 2003 Conference. Lancaster University: UCREL Technical Papers 16. 513-23. McIntyre, D., C. Bellard-Thomson, J. Heywood, A. McEnery, E. Semino and M. Short. 2004. ‘Investigating the presentation of speech, thought and writing presentation in spoken British English. ICAME journal. The digital audio is not available for download because permissions for the distribution and reuse were not acquired by the project.