Spoken language in time and across time: Introduction

Abstract

The idea of this special issue on Spoken language in time and across time emerged at an international symposium on this topic that we organised at Lund University on 20 September 2019. The purpose of the symposium was to celebrate important past and present achievements of spoken language research as well as past and present corpora available for such research. Some speakers reported on academic and technical advances from the past, while others offered information about state-of-the-art research on spoken language and spoken corpus compilation. Our idea with the symposium was also to bring together early career scholars, somewhat more senior scholars as well as senior scholars – the latter actually active when interest in spoken language and spoken corpus compilation was in its infancy. The type of spoken corpora in focus extended from the world's first publicly available, machine-readable spoken corpus, The London–Lund Corpus of Spoken English (Svartvik 1990), nowadays referred to as LLC–1, through to the spoken parts of The British National Corpora (BNC) from 1994 (BNC Consortium 2007) and 2014 (Love et al. 2017), The Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English (DCPSE) consisting of LLC–1 and the British component of The International Corpus of English (ICE–GB), Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (SBCSAE) (Du Bois et al. 2000–5), The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) (Davies 2008–) and finally the most recent one, The London–Lund Corpus 2 (LLC–2) (Põldvere, Johansson & Paradis 2021a). The symposium thus covered approximately half a century of data from publicly available corpora compiled for multipurpose use by the academic community for research on spoken English in different contexts.