Introduction: Innovation in spoken corpus linguistics

Abstract

Over the decades, technological advancements have substantially improved the efficiency and scope of spoken corpus compilation, but there remain many challenges ––both practical and theoretical–– that constrain 1) the quality of spoken corpus data, 2) the scale to which spoken corpora can be compiled, and 3) the authenticity with which spoken language is represented in textual form. This special issue presents eight studies which address contemporary innovations in spoken corpus design, data collection, processing, and analysis, covering a range of speech contexts and varieties. The studies focus on registers including online workplace meetings, casual conversation, oral histories, oral proficiency interviews, and YouTube vlogs. Innovations include the integration of automated transcription tools, multimodal annotation schemes, creative participant recruitment methods, and developments in natural language processing (NLP). Three contributions offer critical reconceptualisations of traditional approaches to spoken corpus design, proposing strategies to improve the authenticity of spoken corpora.