Spoken Corpus Design

This paper describes the approach to spoken corpus design used by the British National Corpus (BNC) project.1 A twopart approach to spoken corpus design has been adopted. The demographic approach uses demographic parameters to sample the everyday speech of the population of British English speakers in the United Kingdom. The context governed approach is designed to cover the full range of linguistic variation found in spoken language using a typology based on four contextual categories: educational, business, public/institutional, and leisure. Details of the processing of recordings are given, together with a description of the context features included in the corpus (such as setting, location, topic, and participant details). The processing and transcription of BNC spoken recordings will be discussed in a forthcoming paper