FYI: IPA Eye Chart, Software/Tagged American Corpus

Author:

Michael Bernstein

FYI Body:

You can now download the Cascadilla Press IPA eye chart for free from our web site in pdf format. The web address is: http://www.cascadilla.com/eyechart.html Yours, Michael Bernstein Cascadilla Press michael@cascadilla.com Athelstan has released the Corpus of Spoken Professional American English (CSPAE), a 2-million word tagged corpus. (For comparison the Brown Corpus and LOB Corpus, popular corpora from the sixties, each contain around 1 million words.) The corpus, based on transcripts of conversations of various types occurring between 1994 and 1998, consists primarily of short interchanges by approximately 400 speakers that are centered on professional activities broadly tied to academics and politics, including academic politics. The corpus, which has been constructed from a selection of existing transcripts of interactions in professional settings, contains two main sub-corpora of a million words each. One sub-corpus consists mainly of academic discussions such as faculty council meetings and committee meetings related to testing. The second sub-corpus is constructed from transcripts of White House press conferences, which are almost exclusively question-and-answer sessions. These transcripts have been chosen because they appear to be relatively unedited and thus include hesitations, false starts, and so on. CSPAE can be used to carry research on lexical and grammatical aspects of spoken discourse such as the use of utterance-initial "well". However, since these transcriptions were not produced with the needs of discourse analysts in mind, they are not suitable for close discourse analysis. There are no indications of pause length or of back channel information. The tagging of the corpus was performed by Tony McEnery and Paul Baker using the CLAWS program at UCREL, Lancaster University. The CLAWS 7 tags in this corpus are similar to those used in the tagging of the British National Corpus. The complexity of this tagged corpus can be handled by using the Tag Search and Suppress Tag features of the concordance program MonoConc Pro 2.0. The concordancer and the tagged corpus can be purchased together (as Concordance Pack II) for $149. The educational price of CSPAE for a single user is $79. Tagged and untagged files are included. The untagged version is available for $49. See http://www.text-search.com for commercial pricing. Michael Barlow mailto: barlow@athel.com Athelstan Website: http://www.athel.com Email: info@athel.com Phone: (800) 598-3880; (713) 523-2837 Fax: (713) 523-6543