From broadcast archive to language corpus: Designing and investigating a sociohistorical corpus from Desert Island Discs

The aims of this paper are twofold: i) to present the motivation and design of a sociohistorical corpus derived from the popular BBC Radio show, ( ); and ii) to illustrate the potential of the DID corpus (DIDC) with a case study. In an era of ever-increasing digital resources and scholarly interest...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inICAME journal Vol. 42; no. 1; pp. 167 - 190
Main Authors Smith, Nicholas, Waters, Cathleen
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Bergen De Gruyter Open 01.03.2018
De Gruyter Poland
Subjects
Case studies
Chat
Corpus analysis
Corpus linguistics
Language change
Radio
Sociolinguistics
Spoken language
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:The aims of this paper are twofold: i) to present the motivation and design of a sociohistorical corpus derived from the popular BBC Radio show, ( ); and ii) to illustrate the potential of the DID corpus (DIDC) with a case study. In an era of ever-increasing digital resources and scholarly interest in recent language change, there remains an enormous disparity between available written and spoken corpora. We describe how a corpus derived from DID contributes to redressing the balance. Treating DID as an example of a specialized register, namely, a ‘biographical chat show’, we review its attendant situational characteristics, and explain the affordances and design features of a sociolinguistic corpus sampling of the show. Finally, to illustrate the potential of DIDC for linguistic exploration of recent change, we conduct a case study on two pronouns with generic, impersonal reference, namely and
ISSN:1502-5462
0801-5775
1502-5462
DOI:10.1515/icame-2018-0008