LINGUIST List 4.452

Thu 10 Jun 1993

FYI: Corpus of Spoken American English

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1. , Corpus of Spoken American English

We are presently putting together a million word corpus of spoken
American English and were wondering whether there were any individuals
on the network who would be interested in helping us collect various kinds
of spoken English from different regions of the United States. We want
the corpus to be as regionally and ethnically diverse as possible,
but we are logistically constrained from sending research assistants
around the country to collect different varieties of speech.

We are interested in collecting the following kinds of broadcast English
(particularly radio and television programs that are locally produced):

interviews/discussions
call-in shows
news broadcasts
demonstrations
speeches
sports commentaries (e.g. broadcasts of baseball games, local tennis matches)
city council meetings, school board meetings, etc. (i.e. anything
 broadcast over local access cable channels)

If you can help us out, all you have to do is:

1) Tape the entire program (commercials and all)

2) Use as good a recorder as possible and a Cr02 90 minute cassette
(we'll send you a blank replacement cassette; also, video cassettes
are fine too)

3) Mail Charles Meyer the tape along with the name and phone number
of the station the program was broadcast on (we will need this
information in order to obtain copyright release)

We're also collecting face-to-face conversations, so if you have good
recording equipment (particularly a good microphone), let us know and
we'll forward tapes and consent forms.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact one of us.

Thanks for your help.

Jack Du Bois Charles Meyer
Linguistics Dept. English Dept.
University of California UMass-Boston
Santa Barbara, CA 93106 Boston, MA 02125
(805) 893-7131 (617) 287-6748
duboishumanitas.ucsb.edu meyerumbsky.cc.umb.edu