Paul ThompsonApplied Linguistics

(p.a.thompson@reading.ac.uk)

Corpora: Resources for the study of language

160 lectures, 39 seminars Transcripts, video and audio 199 XML files:

Transcripts with detailed annotation Metadata included in header

160 lecture transcripts are tagged for Part-of-Speech

www.reading.ac.uk/AcaDepts/ll/base_corpus/ Funded by AHRB, Euralex, BALEAP and university

sources

A corpus of assessed student writing at university level

Texts collected at Warwick, Reading and Oxford Brookes University

Funded by Economic and Social Research Council of England (ESRC)

RES-000-23-0800

6.5 million words 2,896 texts

2,761 assignments XML files, POS-tagged

30+ disciplines 4 levels of study

Query interface:

Sketch Engine

Commercial service: Applied Linguistics

pays annual subscription

Level Raw Rel %

3 225 121.7

2 275 107.7

1 255 96.0

PG 66 62.1

BASE: Linking audio and video to the transcripts, either online or on hard drives Insertion of timestamp data into transcripts

Example Why?

Access to temporal, spatial, paralinguistic, phonological information

Studies of speech rate, for example

Comparison between languages Historical linguistics Stylistics Studies of language in use Specialised language use [eg, doctor-

patient interactions] Investigations of multimodality

PhD thesis corpus Electronic submission

Academic speech events Seminars, tutorials, etc

Student use of computers in preparing assignments [video and text]

Reading and writing of undergraduates

Hosting corpus resources at Reading or other university – preferably on Linux servers – with customisable interfaces BASE, BAWE, and other corpora that Reading

possesses For use by all departments at Reading and also

elsewhere Varied levels of user access Centralised support needed – lack of continuity

with project staff